Ask me why I brought a toy to school!

 October 20, 2023

Looking Back


This week, we focused on several words with 2 sounds each. The words were: it, if, us, at, up, am, in. The sounds we reviewed were the short vowel sounds: a, e, i, o, u. We are becoming experts in knowing the difference between a consonant and a vowel. Ask your child to tell you the sound of each short vowel and to show you the signal that goes with it. We got out the guitar this week to share in singing a song about short vowels. 


We were very excited to begin a new topic in Science about Matter. We began by looking at a colourful picture of a collection of toys and asking how we would describe these toys with words. We noticed that each of the toys was unique and learned a fancy word: properties. We came up with many different properties (e.g. soft, hard, tall, short, heavy, light, smooth, squishy, blue, red, etc.) to describe the toys. The next day, we were very excited to bring in our own toy from home to use in our Science/Literacy learning. We drew and coloured a detailed picture of the toy we brought and then wrote at least 3 sentences to describe the properties of our toy. Since we had our toys at school, we also decided to read to them and teach them our grade one routines and expected behaviours. We think our toys learned a lot at school on Wednesday. 


In Math, we began our week with a representing number task. Students were each given a number between 5 and 20. Many different tools were provided (blocks, ten frames, whiteboards and markers, number lines, etc.). The challenge was to create a “number island” on the top of their desk to represent (show) their number in as many different ways as they could. This challenge was a great starting point to help us know what we are already understanding about representing numbers and what we need to learn next. For the rest of the week, we focused on representing numbers using tally marks. We have learned a rhyme (1, 2, 3, 4, number 5 shuts the door). Ask your child to show you how this works when doing tally marks. 


Looking Forward


Our field trip to Storybook Theatre is coming up on Tuesday October 24. Please return all forms by Monday. Fees can be paid online through your “My CBE Account”.


As Halloween approaches we are sending out a few reminders about what the day will look like at school. Your child is welcome to dress up for the day. We ask that masks, weapons and any other loose accessories stay at home to reduce the risk of things getting lost or broken. We will be providing a number of Halloween themed learning activities that day. Please do not send treats for everyone in the class.

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