Celebrating Tunisia Culture

This week we wrapped up our study of Tunisian culture. The students have been working hard to complete a class slideshow about life in Tunisia. This slideshow will be shared with you on Tuesday night at Student Led Conferences.

We celebrated Tunisia by completing a number of different activities and enjoying some food from the culture. The students learned how to weave, created bean mosaics, played a game called Mancala and read more books about the country.

The students were able to try dates, couscous, baklava and flat bread brushed with olive oil.

In Language Arts this week, we continued working through our fairy tale story writing project. As a class we brainstormed "juicy words" and used these to write descriptive paragraphs to describe the settings for a villain and hero of our class fairy tale story. As we finish modelling good writing for each part of a fairy tale, the students will have the chance to write their own stories.

We also started a new spelling program called "Words Their Way". We will be using this for the remainder of the school year. The students have been divided into groups and will be working through different spelling and phonetic rules. The students get their words each Monday. These words are then cut and sorted and the students complete a different activity each day of the week. On Friday, the students are tested on ten of their words. Two new words that following the spelling pattern they have been working on, are also added to their test. Please sign these tests and send them back to school on the following Monday. We have also subscribed to spelling city, so your child can play all of the games now. The link to spelling city is on the side column of our blog. Please ask your child to show you this site.

In Math, we have been working on mental math strategies. This week we worked through "making ten". For example, if the addition equation is 8+5, the students have been taught to think of this as 10 +3 (making the 8 a 10 by adding 2 from the 5). This will help them when they are trying to add larger numbers mentally. For example, for the questions 47 + 8, the students would add 50 + 5 in their head (changing the 47 to 50 by adding 3 from the 8). The students also used the "making doubles" method to add numbers together mentally. For example 9+8 = 8+8+1 and 7+6 = 7+7-1.

We have also been working on some math games to review regrouping 3 digit addition and subtraction questions. The students will have the opportunity to play with you at Student Led Conferences.

Here are the super readers for the week! Way to go!

In gym this week the kids played a game called Q-Tip ball. They had a lot of fun and worked on strengthening their hand eye coordination!

Congratulations to our new Student of the Week!

Dr. Seuss Day!

Our class, along with our Grade One buddy class, celebrated Dr. Seuss'  birthday. The students were asked to bring in any Dr. Seuss books that they had at home to read to our little buddies. They also worked together to complete a directed drawing of everyone's favourite character, The Cat in the Hat!

In Language Arts this week, we continued to work on our fairy tale writing project. The students had the opportunity to choose their favourite fairy tale. They discussed the story with their friend and then rewrote it in their booklets. The students were reminded to write about all of the characters, including the hero and the villian, a detailed setting, problem and solution. When these were complete, they had the opportunity to share their fairy tale with the class.

We also talked about how fairy tales teach lessons. We read Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs and then talked about the lessons that were learned. The students then wrote about the lessons from their favourite fairy tale. A lot of the them wrote about kindness and being grateful for what we have.

In Math, the students wrote a final assessment on three digit addition and subtraction. Throughout the next couple of weeks, we will be working on mental math strategies.

We finished reading about Tunisia by focusing on the environment and the goods and services. The students have been partnered up to work on a class slideshow about Tunisia. Each pair has been assigned a topic and is responsible for creating a Google slide which will include pictures and a few sentences. The topics include, food, clothing, transportation, school, festivals, goods, services, environment and sports. To finish our culture study, we will also be celebrating Tunisia Day in the afternoon, on March 10th.

In Phys. Ed., we worked on some kicking skills and played indoor soccer.

Congrats to our super readers this week!!