December 22, 2017

Hello everyone!

Our last week of school before the break was exciting and fun! We made our beautiful Christmas ornaments and decorated our bags. We learned how to wrap our own presents and curl the ribbon. Our elf Snowy made his final report to Santa: the children were all good this year!

  

All of the kids have done an amazing job working with their sight words. Each week they do better on their spelling tests. Our words of the week for our first week back in January will be:
1. saw
2. on 
3. off
4. had
5. day

Over the holidays we encourage families to find time for literacy together - have your child read a Christmas story to the family after dinner, or sing favourite carols together. We also found this great article about reading and writing with your child. Feel free to check it out for ways to help your kids stay on track over the holidays!
http://www.edu.gov.on.ca/eng/literacynumeracy/parentGuideLitEn.pdf

Here is a page from our making words book - this is the activity we do with the kids where they write each letter on a little square of paper and rearrange them to make different words. This is a great activity to get kids thinking about stretching their words out and figuring out letter order for longer words. We learn lots of rhyming words this way (the kids always come up with more words than we have on our list). Next time your child comes home with their letters you can ask them to show you how they work and what the mystery word is (the word that uses every letter).








At home math activities can be fun and engaging - real world numeracy and literacy are a great way to show children how math and reading surround us. We always advocate for any kind of board games and puzzles (which are also great for family nights) like trouble, snakes and ladders, sorry, uno, etc. You can also practice estimating (how many oranges are in the bag?), measuring (how many paper clips long is your hand? What about dad's hand?), adding (how many red cars do you see? How many blue? How many altogether?), subtracting (I have six cookies, if I eat two how many will I have left?), and patterning (sorting forks, knives, and spoons into patterns). These small steps each day are excellent for growing minds! Notice what your child is especially curious about (planets, foxes, roller coasters, etc) and do some extra research at home about these things through the internet or library books - showing children they can learn about their favourite things by reading will encourage them to read even more.

We also have included the usernames and passwords in your report card envelope required for your child to login to Mathletics and Raz-kids (the coloured laminated cards) - these are also great resources for kids to be practicing their literacy and numeracy at home.

2017 is coming to an end. We were so touched by all the children who were emotional and weepy about leaving us for these two weeks - it really shows how much fun we all have here together when the children don't want to leave school! We are so thankful and lucky to be with your children each day, learning and growing together. All of us here at Cranston school wish your families a restful and safe holiday season, and we look forward to seeing everyone return on the first day back, January 9th 2018!

Sincerely,
Ms. Cvach, Mrs. Kenna, and Ms. Pipo


                         

December 15, 2017

Hello everyone!
We are into the final countdown to Christmas. In order to keep all the kids focused and calm we have been doing yoga a few times a week! The kids are getting better and better each time. Check out this photo of everyone doing this tricky pose.
 

Our elf Snowy has been getting himself into all kinds of trouble at school this week - we were thinking that we need to tell Santa about this naughty little elf!



During our five senses lessons this week we explored sight and what it feels like to try regular tasks without our eyes. The kids took turns in pairs wearing a blindfold and being the guiding friend - with the help of a guiding friend kids were able to try washing their hands, writing their names, jumping through a hoop, and lots of other stations without using their sight! It was a great activity to highlight how much we rely on our eyes, and how careful and empathetic we have to be as a guiding friend. To close off we talked about how guide dogs work as a guiding friend for those who are visually impaired.



We would also like to thank everybody for their contributions to the Christmas bags - we ended up with piles of gifts for children at other schools in need, and we decorated the bags so they looked beautiful. Way to go getting into the Christmas spirit of giving and sharing everyone! The schools who received the gift are going to pay the generosity forward by writing Christmas cards to others in need.
 

Another big round of applause for the amazing Christmas concert! We loved seeing all the kids dressed up and excited to sing in the spotlight. We watched Frosty the Snowman while waiting for our turn to preform (some of our kids even teared up during the movie when we thought Frosty was gone forever - but thank goodness he came back. Precious!)



Our snowman puzzle math centre is continuing to be a big hit! We also introduced some new board games this week - the Pete the Cat button jar game has proven especially popular.




Words of the Week!
In just the first two weeks of our sight word focus, we have noticed a huge improvement in sight word recognition and the spelling of the sight words we have been talking about. Great job to everybody for working hard at home and at school with their words. Our new words of the week are: and, the, went, my, look. If you are looking for more activities to help your child with sight words this is a great website exploring how children learn their sight words:  http://www.k12reader.com/sight-word-teaching-strategies/
Happy sight word learning!

Wishing you a lovely weekend,
Mrs. Kenna, Ms. Cvach, and Ms. Pipo

December 8, 2017

Hello everybody!

We are in full dress rehearsal mode getting ready for our Christmas concert. Our class concert will be on Wednesday, December 13th. We have one show at 1:00pm (please note tickets are not needed for this show) and the second show is at 6:30 pm (for the evening show each person attending must have a ticket. We sent two tickets home with each child this week. If you would like to request extra tickets please call the office). The dress code for the night is to wear anything black, white, red, and/or green (any combination of these colours is fine). See you then!

We would also like to thank all the kids this week for studying and working hard to remember their sight words. We are so proud of how well they all did on their spelling test. Our new words of the week are going to be: he, she, can, play, and to. If you would like some great ideas on practicing these sight words at home check out this great website: http://www.thejennyevolution.com/fun-ways-practice-sight-words/

In literacy this week we made puppets to retell our how and why story of the week which came from Ghana, titled Why Chickens and Hawks are Enemies. After learning to retell the story with puppets, kids partnered up to rewrite the stories together on paper. They did a really wonderful job of both remembering the story and working together.
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Our math centre rounds have been going great. On Thursday when we announced it was time for math centres the whole class cheered! Hooray for being excited about math! The snowman numbers matching puzzle has proved especially popular and this group wanted to show off how they finished the entire thing.


In science we are learning more about our five senses. We played guess the sound games to explore our hearing, and talked about what life would be like without our sense of hearing. We learned a few sign language signs (bathroom, listen, and help) and practiced twinkle twinkle little star in American sign language.
We also really put our sense of sight to the test. Looking at lots of optical illusions made our brains feel like they were getting a workout and noticed how even our senses can fool us. Our homemade 3D hand illusions turned out spectacular and all the children were amazed to see their hands popping right out of the page.

Thanks for another amazing week of grade 1. Have a great weekend. :)

- Mrs. Kenna, Ms. Cvach, and Ms. Pipo