Mrs. Gibbs' Class Blog: Week 3 Update

Information:

PA Day
Monday, September 23rd is a PA Day.

Reading Homework
Students should be reading at home each night for at least 15 minutes. To track this progress, and help set new reading goals, students have been instructed to record their reading in the yellow reading log stapled into their agendas. For more information check out the Homework page on this blog.

Family Journals
Students completed their Family Journal this afternoon. The journals should have come home in a green folder. If possible, please take a few minutes to review this at home and help your child remember to bring it back to school on Tuesday. Information about the Family Journals is located in the green folder on the first page.

Meet the Teacher Night
Next Thursday, September 26th is Meet the Teacher Night. We are looking forward to welcoming families into the classroom! If you are unable to attend but would like to visit our classroom another time, please let Mrs. Gibbs know.

Georgina Island Pow Wow

On Saturday, September 28th there will be an opportunity for students and their families to attend the Chippewas of Georgina Island Pow Wow. Any students who want to attend must also have at least one parent or guardian who is travelling with them as staff will not be responsible for supervision. The bus will leave Rick Hansen Public School at 10:00 am and will depart Georgina Island at 4:30pm. Please note that there are limited seats available on the bus. You are welcome to bring as many family members as you'd like. Please register on School Cash Online. This opportunity will be on a first come first served basis.

The bus will take us to Virginia Beach where we will catch the ferry to the island and then a bus shuttle to the event. We will use a free ferry shuttle to get to and from the Island. Please see below for the entrance cost per person for the Pow Wow.

We at Rick Hansen Public School are deeply committed to meeting the Calls To Action as outlined by Canada’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. We hope that our broader school community will enjoy this opportunity to learn more about our partners in education on Georgina Island.

Learning Update:

Literacy

We continue to build stamina during read to self time by reading for a minute longer each day. We are now able to read for 15 minutes. This week we learned how to read to someone by either choosing the I Read You Read model, or the Choral Reading model. We discussed the purpose of reading to someone (it's a way to practise reading fluently and with expression).

This week we also learned about the comprehension strategy of checking for understanding by asking ourselves "who?" and "what?" after reading a page. If we feel confused about the information on the page we back up and reread it! We have also been reviewing different decoding strategies.

Our "CAFE Menu" with the reading strategies that we have learned about

Mrs. Gibbs continues to work on reading individually with each student.

In Writer's Workshop this week, we began using our Writer's Notebooks! First we learned how to generate ideas by brainstorming different topics (e.g., special people, special places, likes and dislikes). Then we learned how to take these ideas and turn them into pieces of writing. After writing time, students gathered in a circle to listen to each other share their writing.

Math

Here are our current learning goals in math:

I can read and print whole numbers to twenty
I can count forward by 1s,2s,5s,10s, and 25s, to 200
I can count backwards by 1s from 50 starting at any number

We spent some time counting objects in the classroom by 2s, 5s, and 10s.

Many students will benefit from practising skip counting at home by counting objects in the house, or outside in nature by 2s and 5s.

Next week we will begin learning about place value. Stay tuned for information about this.

Social Studies

In social students this week, we discussed birthdays. Students shared the different traditions that they do on their birthdays (e.g., having a party, getting presents, eating cake). We discovered that some of our traditions are different! (e.g., signing Happy Birthday in a different language, eating pizza vs. a different type of food, getting homemade gifts, hanging up a special birthday poster).

Next we will be learning about how traditions might change over time (e.g., how did parents or grandparents celebrate their 6th or 7th birthday? what's the same? what's different?)

If you would like to come into our classroom to share about a special birthday tradition we would LOVE to have you and learn about it! Please let Mrs. Gibbs know.

Outdoor Learning and Inquiry

This year we will spend lots of time learning outside! We spent some of our art class outside in the community garden finding inspiration for paintings. We have also become very interested in spiders after we saw one on our window! Today we went on a spider hunt and we found many different webs! Inside we discussed the idea of "reading for a purpose" and using non-fiction books to learn more about topics that we find interesting.

We have dedicated a big table in our classroom as our inquiry table. Right now there are some books about spiders on it, as well as a skull that Mrs. Gibbs found in a forest! Students enjoyed wondering about which animal the skull came from, while building strong oral communication skills at the same time :)