Family Tradition

Do you have a tradition that is important to you and your family?  If you doo please reply and tell us about it!

Christmas

We are learning a lot about Christmas right now.  We will be learning about baby Jesus and the nativity.  We will be looking at Hanukkah and learning about the symbols and customs.  We may have a special visitor later in the week to read How the Grinch Stole Christmas to our class.   We are writing our own story about the North Pole.  We will be making some ornaments and things to bring home!!  We are going to be trying to trap a Gingerbread man in another STEM challenge.  There is so much to do!! 

We are learning about different ways to add and subtract, the senses and we will get letters from our pen pals in Hopedale Labrador!!  We sent them a letter last week and made Christmas cards for them.  We are waiting for the letter they sent to us!!

Don't forget on the last day of school before Christmas dismissal is at 1:00.

Catch up!!

Hi, things have been crazy lately!!  First I want to catch everyone up on things we have been doing in our classroom!  At the end of each month every class chooses 2 or 3 students to recognize for a achievement.  Last month parker, Ella and Olivia were recognized in an assembly for being awesome!!

 

Way to go!!

 

We have also been sent a class elf from Santa!!  Her name is Candy.  She brought us a present from Santa, it was candy cane seeds.  We planted them last week and grew them. 

 

 

They really did grow!!  I let the children eat their candy canes on the morning of our Christmas concert.  I left to bring something to the office and when I got back the children had a thank you ready for me for letting them eat their candy canes.  I was so touched!!  I have beautiful students! They really made my day!  here is their video.  It is so sweet!!

Class thank you!

 

The concert was awesome!!  A big thank you to Miss Gale who filled in for me because my daughter had her Christmas concert the same night.

We have now worked our way through three vowels a, i, o.  Please view the flipped classroom videos with your child over the weekend.

We have also learned about digraphs which are two letters that make one sound.  Please watch Geraldine Giraffe as she finds, sh, ch, th, wh and ck around her house.  I am hoping to finish teaching the short vowels e and u by Christmas.

We are beginning our second unit in Science now too and we will be exploring materials and our senses.

In Math we are learning about patterns now.  Here are some of the Pattern I can statements Grade One students are responsible for learning.

I can:

describe the core of a repeating pattern of up to four elements.

identify and describe any errors in a repeating pattern

can identify the missing elements in a repeating pattern.

create and describe a repeating pattern using manipulatives, sounds, actions, diagrams.

reproduce and extend a repeating pattern.

describe a repeating pattern in my environment

identify repeating events such as days, birthdays, seasons

can represent a given repeating pattern in another way, such as actions to sound, colour to shape, ABC to animals.

describe a given repeating pattern using a letter code. (ABCABC…)

We are soon moving on to addition and subtraction to 18.  

We are also practicing for our Christmas concert on the 10th of December.  Mrs. Smith our music teacher has the songs and music on her website if you would like to practice the songs at home.  I have put the songs for Grade One below.

Let's Build a Gingerbread House

Little Snowflake

Deck the Halls

Christmas Songs

Pattern Zebras

Hi everyone, It has been a busy couple of weeks.  Term one is at an end and we are beginning term two!! I can't believe that term one is done.  Report cards go home next Tuesday and your children have worked so hard!!  I can't believe how much they have learned!! They are pretty amazing!!

We have been busy here at school. I am going to post some pictures to show some of the things that we have been doing.

 

Here we are making pattern zebras with our Grade Four buddies!!  We had lots of fun!

Conservation Corps Presentation

Yesterday we had a visit from Penny Moran with the Conservation Corps. I invited her to come and speak to our class about conservation and how important it is.  She was wonderful with the children and they enjoyed her talk very much.  She read a story to them and then they all got to take home a copy of the book for themselves.  She also did an activity where she had a student pretend to be the earth and she wrapped him up in a blanket to show how all the things humans do that is causing the earth's temperature to rise.  Then the children suggested ways to help cool the earth back down from the examples in the story and when each idea was suggested a picture was removed from the blanket until finally non remained and the blanket could be removed.  The students really enjoyed it!!  thank you Penny and The Conservation Corps.

Sight Word Game

After we made our tinfoil and pipe cleaner creations the children played a sight word game.  We used sight words from the Pre-Primer list of words which is the first list I teach in Grade One.  I wrote the word on a sticky note and the children had one each on their heads.  they had a clipboard, pencil and a class list and they had to go around and write the word on each head of their classmate on their list next to that child's name.  When they had all their words they had to read them.  We had a lot of fun!!It also helps them know the names of their classmates because believe it or not some still do not know everyone's name.  The best part was when one of my students lined up three other people beside her and said "Look, Mrs. Murphy our words can make a sentence.  I can come here."  Those are the teachable moments I love!!!

 

 

 

A busy couple of weeks!!

Hi, the past couple of weeks have been quite busy and I have not had much time to sit and share some of the wonderful things that are happening in my classroom.  I am happy to say that my students have now settled into the routine of Daily 5 and it is amazing to watch!!  I love it because it gives me time to spend with each child.  During that time I either do assessment or I am teaching directly one on one or in small groups. I think it is my favorite time of day!!

A couple of my students have been asking me for more STEM challenges in the classroom and I am so excited that they enjoy doing these.  So I searched and came up with a tinfoil and pipe cleaner challenge for them.  It is amazing to watch them work.  I gave them a set number of pipe cleaners and sheets of tinfoil.  They had to find two other partners who they thought they would work well with.  I had five groups of three.  We completed a problem solving Math lesson to decide what equal groups wold be.  That lesson was awesome on its own!!  Then they began and I gave them no limits to what they could make.  There ideas were pretty creative.  The students are learning to work together as a team, use nice language, problem solve and they learn how to deal with failure. (Like when their tinfoil keeps ripping.)  Here are some videos of them explaining their creations:
Parker and Rylan

Madison

Emily

Ella

Logan

Kayla

Gracie

Keira

Alexis

Aiden, Olivia and Gavin

Happy Halloween!!

 

 



I hope everyone had a safe and happy Halloween!!  Our day at school on Thursday was awesome!!  We talked about safety rules, and we participated in a STEM challenge where the students had 100 toothpicks and some candy.  They had to build the tallest structure they could with the tooth picks and candy.  It was a lot more difficult than they thought it would be!!

They had a lot of fun and the language they used was awesome.  They are learning how to problem-solve and to work together as a team to solve a problem!!

Our Halloween party was fun too!!  Here is my spooky class!!!

                                                    Happy Halloween from us to you!!

Pumpkins!!

Hi, I am excited to be back at school today.  I spent part of last week at the Department of Education working with the English Language Arts curriculum guide.  I love doing this kind of work!!  It really gives me a better understanding of the English Language Arts curriculum.  I love working with other teachers and hearing about some of the wonderful things they are doing in their classrooms!!

Today we read the story "Spookley, The Square Pumpkin".  We did a response to this story and everyone had the opportunity to write about their favorite part of the story.  After recess we carved our class pumpkin we got from our visit to Lester's Farm.  We estimated the number of pumpkin seeds. There were actually 587 seeds in our pumpkin. We wrote the steps to carve our pumpkin. We talked about what we needed to do first, second, third, etc. We voted on the type of eyes, nose and mouth.  We even voted on our pumpkin's name.  He is called Boo Spookley!  Here are some pictures from today.

 

 

 

Happy Halloween!!

Tomorrow we are going to try our roasted pumpkin seeds to see what they taste like. 

Sorry no posting in a while, between the stomach flu hitting my house and watching the Blue Jays it's been a bit crazy!! I wanted to let everyone know that our school raised $676.00 for the Janeway Children's hospital!!!! Awesome!! A big thank you to everyone who brought a donation and wore their pyjamas!!

Don't forget that tomorrow is picture day.

We are working our way though the short a word families. We will begin the am and ack word families this week.  I will try to post videos for that soon.

That's all for now. Go Blue Jays Go!!!!

Apple hand experiment and an words family

Last week we conducted an experiment to see how dirty hands really are.  We took three apple slices and one we put in a mason jar without anyone touching it.  The next one we passed around so everyone in the class had a turn touching the apple.  The third slice we cleaned our hands with a baby wipe and then touched the apple slice.  We put each apple slice in a clean mason jar, screwed on the lid and waited.  here are our results.

The apple no one touched

The apple everyone touched before we cleaned our hands.

The apple we all touched after using a baby wipe.

 

 

The apple no one touched had the least amount of mold.  But we were surprised to notice that the apple slices with the baby wipe and the dirty hands both had about the same amount of mold on them!!!!

 

We all decided that washing our hands with soap and water is very, very important!!!

 

Our an family spiders!!  Aren't they creepy!!!



What a busy day today!!  We began learning about fire safety at school and at home.  Please review your escape plan for your house and complete the homework page and return it.  We are learning about the an word family.  Please view the videos in the flipped classroom section for tomorrow.  The at word family videos are still available, they have their own page now. 

Today the students used their writing journals for the first time.  they did a wonderful job beginning each sentence with an uppercase, using finger spaces and stopping their sentence when they were done!!  We are practicing printing our first and last names on our work and using only lowercase letters in our printing.

I have an I wonder question for my students....

I wonder does the weather stay the same all day or does it change?  How do you know?

Please answer me using our class blog.  I am looking forward to your answers!!!

Mrs. Murphy

This has been quite a busy week here at Mary Queen of the World!!  On Wednesday morning the students were treated to smoothies by The kids Eat Smart program and Nalcor. They really enjoyed this!!

 

Later that day I gave the students a STEM challenge.  (Science Technology Engineering and Math)  They were arranged in small groups of three or four and they had to build the highest tower they could in ten minutes.  We agreed to measure the height using a metre stick.  I gave them objects to use that were not good joiners.  They were told they could build any type of structure.  We discussed teamwork and being a good winner and loser.  It was a lot of fun and they really enjoyed it.  I was excited to hear all of the positive problem solving conversations that were happening!! 

 

 

 

I hope everyone has a wonderful Thanksgiving!!!  Please take time to remember everything you are thankful for!!  I am very thankful for my family, friends and the wonderful students and their families this year!!  Enjoy your Holiday!!

 

 

Happy Thanksgiving!!!!