Valentine's Day with the Busy Bees!

We have enjoyed some good fiction stories about Valentine's Day this week. We have also read a non-fiction book about Valentine's Day. We certainly have learned some facts about Valentine's Day too! Ask us what we have learned! 

We have had lots of Valentine activities the past week and topped it off today with even more! We have had a day full of smiles and our hearts are full! Thank you to all the special valentines shared today. It made the day full of excitement as students were able to give and receive some kind messages.

We also received a special package today! We had written a letter to another class in a different school in St. Marys asking us to be our penpals! And today, they sent a package back with a big letter to our class AND a Valentine's Day card and letter to each of us! We are excited to write back and make a new friend!

What a way to top off this exciting week full of special events! Happy Valentine's Day to you all and enjoy the long weekend with your family! See you on Tuesday for more learning excitement for Pancake Day! 

Skating Trip!

Our skating trip was so much fun! The 1/2 Busy Bees tried so hard out on the ice. Many of our students practiced and persevered and were able to skate around the whole rink! Many students enjoyed being helpers to others as well. We have an amazing class full of kind, hard-working kids!

Thank you to family members who prepared gear and made sure our students were ready for the afternoon. Thank you as well to all volunteers who came to help at the rink. Our trip went so smoothly, thanks to you!

A special thank you to School Council for covering the costs of this trip and making it a fun experience for all of our students. We had a great afternoon!

Phonics Lesson 70 dge /j/ & Phonics Lesson 72 Long vcc Words: Feb 9-13 (Reading Practice Book)

Phonics Lessons - Feb 9-13

Lesson 70: dge /j/

We have learned that the consonant digraph j spells /j/ like at the beginning of the word jar. The consonant g also spells /j/ when followed by a silent e, such as in the word cage.  

The grapheme dge is another way to spell /j/. This is a trigraph which means it is three letters that make one sound. The trigraph dge only comes at the end of the word and follows after a short vowel sound, as in the words dodge and bridge. 

We spent some time realizing the difference of when to use dge and ge. That gets confusing when there are choices to spell the same sound. We found that dge is used only at the end of words and only after short vowel sounds. However, ge is used when after a consonant or long vowel like in cage or charge. 

 

In this week's text called, The Lodge, students are looking for words with the trigraph dge to make the /j/ sound. They are looking to highlight the whole word with this spelling pattern. Students are also asked to illustrate the story to demonstrate their understanding of the text.

Lesson 72: Lon vcc Words

There are some tricky word endings that change the sound of the vowel ins words. It happens with the vowel and then followed by two specific consonant letter combinations on o and i words: 

ild - has a long i sound like in the word wild

ind - often, but not always, has the long i sound like in the word mind

old - with a long o sound like in the word told

olt - with a long o sound like in the word bolt

ost - often, but not always, has the long o sound like in the word host

We use our decoding strategy 'vowel owl' to know that vowels can sometimes say the other sound and we need to try both if the word doesn't sound right or make sense in our sentence. 

In this week's text called, The Gold Rush, students are looking for those words that follow these vcc (-ild, -old, -ind, -olt, -ost) spelling patterns that have the two consonants following the vowel change the vowel to a long vowel sound. They are looking to highlight the whole word. Students are also looking to illustrate the story to demonstrate their understanding of the text.

Heart (Irregular) Words of the Week

Heart words are words that do not decode or follow the spelling rules that we have been learning. We have to know them by 'heart'. However, once we learn more spelling rules, they may be only temporary heart words and the rules will come along later! In the meantime, we have been focusing on reviewing and learning the words below with focused in class practice. These will eventually (if not already) be on spelling word lists or word rings. 

This week we are reviewing:

• there
• where
• friend
• because
• woman
• women

This week's new words:

• move
• both

Fluency Grids
With each lesson, there is a fluency grid with the lesson focus that is intended to help students recognize the phonics rule and assist in reading it with accuracy and automaticity. At home, challenge your young reader to read the word (aim is to decode/read each word within 3 seconds) and then recall it each time they see it within the grid of mixed up, repeated words. A couple minutes of practice is all they need. This acts as a warm up before reading the text that also applies the same skill while building on all the previous skills as well. Each week we are building on the previous week to become more fluent readers so we can focus on what the text is sharing rather than spending all the time decoding the words.

Homework Reminders
Students have been working on the story or stories in their Reading Practice book this week that will come home each weekend. At school, they work with a partner to complete their fluency grid, read with someone their story and highlight the focus words. Following, they are illustrating a picture for the text to show their understanding. 

At home, students are to finish the above tasks and read to an expert the week's lesson(s). After completing, parents are to initial at the indicated spot at the top. 

This week, we are have completed two lessons so there will be two stories to complete in their white Reading Practice booklet after the clip. Please see the information letter in the front of the book for more, detailed information about this weekend practice book coming home. Please return on Monday (or Tuesday if there is a no school day on Monday).

Happy reading!

100th Day of School!!!

   

We have made it to the 100th day in Grade 1/2, and we were celebrating with some great activities throughout the day!

In math, we did some practice with the number 100! This is our first time really counting and writing a 3 digit number! We made our trail mix with 100 treats. Thanks to those families that sent in the items to help make this activity happen! We have some great goodie bags of treats to bring home with 100 items in them (well, minus a few they got to eat at school to celebrate!)

We read a great book about the 100th Day of School to celebrate. We love the 'Night Before' series and enjoyed the 'The Night Before 100th Day of School'. In our reading centers, we aimed to read 100 books! We passed our goal with 102! We read a poem about the 100th day and in writing, we wrote with the number 100 in mind. Take a peek at our digital portfolios today for our writing today! As a class, we aimed to write 100 sentences and we surpassed our goal!!! Wow! Those were some pretty interesting super sentences. We are working on remembering to include COPPSS every time we write so this was some good practice. We are seeing more complex spelling patterns and applying some of the words we have learned this year! Way to go, Busy Bees!

We got our bodies moving with what we can do in one hundred seconds just as a quick activity to see how long 100 seconds really is!

We also tried handing out 100 smiles today! The number 100 was certainly our theme in everything we did! 

What a great day celebrating how much smarter we are now that we have come to school for 100 days in Grade 1/2!!

More Mental Math Strategies...

   

We are learning more addition and subtraction mental math strategies!! We have been reviewing the 12 we have learned up until this week! An updated collection of these will come home on Monday to replace any old sheets. The collection is also posted below for reference. Please use these at home to help with our math work that comes home and to practice these strategies when you get a chance to build our skills of our math facts! Students are loving the math challenges that are presented and should be proud of all they are learning! 

This week we are diving into an addition strategy called Doubles Plus One! We recognize this is when two numbers are neighbours and we can think of them like our doubles fact and then just add one more! We have been really focusing on doubles lately with our strategies and how they can quickly help us with several different math facts (doubles, monkey in the middle and now doubles plus one). 

Next week, we will focus on a new subtraction strategy called Subtraction as Think Addition! We have really been learning about how addition and subtraction are related and the numbers can be rearranged to to make addition or subtraction sentences. So if addition is easier (and is for most), we can take subtraction sentences to really be addition sentences to help us solve math problems! 

Count On and Count Back are really used if no other strategy is available but still need a plan B! 

Again, we will be focusing on one per week (sometimes two if we need some extra time with learning), then we will review all strategies on Thursday and then on Fridays we will have our 5 question quiz to see how we are doing as we continue to learn and apply these strategies.

We are becoming math whizzes!! 

More About Our Word Work...

We are now into our next focus of our phonological and phonemic awareness! Students are really showing a lot of growth in understanding word knowledge as we complete these daily activities! 

The focus of this next newsletter below and is all about isolating, adding, deleting and substituting sounds within words. This will be our focus for the next while in our class oral activities to really build our strengths in letter sound knowledge within words. Included below is some information and activities to work on at home to compliment our learning in the classroom.  

Winter Carnival

Some of these special days make the best memories! We were so lucky to be able to enjoy Winter Carnival today, especially after all the winter weather this past week!! Turned out to be a perfect day for it! 

All students were assigned a multi-age group team with our 6/7's as the team leaders and the 7/8's as the event organizers. Thanks to Madame Charette and Mrs. Stemmler for all their organizing with the students to make this fantastic event for the students to enjoy! 

We even got to indulge in some hot chocolate as a special treat to 'warm up' with during our event today! Another day that EVERYONE was full of smiles and full hearts to get to have a great experience with one special winter activity.