ELA
Spelling - Our words this week focused on the digraphs "th" and "wh". We will move onto long vowels next week but will continue to introduce hunks and chunks that will help children decode new and tricky words while reading.
Reading - In Reader's Workshop children learned an easy way to retell a story in a summarized manner using the words first, then, next, after that and finally to sequence and order the retelling. We also worked on reading decoding skills by introducing students to a series of animal friends that help children remember the decoding skills - looking at pictures, sounding out right across the word, getting your mouth ready to say the first sound in a word, recognizing smaller words or chunks in words, flipping vowel sounds, skipping over words and coming back to them and seeing if the word makes sense.
Writing- Children enjoyed sharing their holiday experiences in morning circle verbally and during writing time with journal writing following the writing process. Students are confidently planning, writing a draft, editing with help and publishing their writing pieces. Next week we will move onto descriptive writing similar to our five sense poems.
We started a new Chapter looking at numbers to 20. Children worked on grouping items into groups of ten, and writing numbers past 10 in 'place value charts'. On Monday children were given a group task of matching number words to numbers and dots in a ten frame and making a reference poster they can check the spelling of numbers above ten. Students also learnt how to represent place value with numbers and cubes in some simple math games.
Discussing where children had gone for Winter Break was a nice lead into our next topic in Social Studies, Looking At Our World. Each child added a sticker to our class world map to show where they been in the world. Students enjoyed thinking of a place outdoors where they like to play and drew a picture of it. In morning circle students shared the location of such places in relation to their house using direction words such as left, right, in front of and behind. We also started looking at locating things on a map. We will continue with mapping next week.
Our first unit in Science this term is Objects Up in the Sky. We started off by sharing what we know about objects in the sky and watched some videos of the moons phases and discussed how the moon seems to change over time. Students will participate in a 2 week moon watch. Starting next Monday students will record what the moon looks and draw their observations.
This term we have reset Class Dojo points. Miss Natasha came to our class to congratulate our top Dojo Points student who was Maya Pemba. Congratulations Maya! We talked about how to earn Dojo points in Term 2.
Larissa