Miss Gill's Extraordinary Ones!!!

Dear Families,

It’s my first post for February! Where did those 5 months go?! I can still vividly remember seeing your child’s bright smile enter Grade One :) I look forward to our next five months of purposeful, passionate, and peaceful learning together! I hope you have a wonderful weekend with your loved ones and enjoy fun, interactive ways to enjoy this cool, crisp winter! If you’re planning on attending the “Winterama” have a blast! I know some of my students have been ‘buzzing’ about their upcoming experience with this and they’re already eager to be writing about it in their Writer’s Workshop notebooks on Monday! The enthusiasm I have received from various students for writing is heart soaring for me J

Honesty Recipients:

Congratulations Cassius & Ashlee!

On Monday, we honoured and celebrated January’s Character Trait of Honesty as a school family. Congratulations to Ashlee and Cassius for being recognized for displaying this trait. Please continue being your truthful selves in and out of the classroom, your actions are making a difference in our school. I know that your peers admire this quality about you!

This month’s character trait is INCLUSIVENESS – “We invite everyone to play, we never turn anyone away.” We are fortunate to be in a school culture that is sensitive to the needs of others – staff and students work together to ensure that we foster a community that is safe, strong, and free. This being said, as your child’s teacher, I will continue to explicitly model, guide, reinforce, and support inclusion so all my students feel a sense of belonging.

Procedural Writing:

I have been saving this lesson for what seems like months, but we’ve finally got to it! Mrs. Roth bought some real corn on the cob for us (thank you so much for this) to make our very own popcorn in a brown paper bag! I decided to link this deliciousness with Procedural Writing. First, I had shown the students the brown paper bag and they had to predict what they thought we would be making. They had to use their sense of hearing because I shook the bag. Many felt it was a rock as it made a thumping sound. Then, I let each student gently feel the outside of the bag and make a new prediction. Their answers varied a little bit. Next, we all washed our hands and I let the students feel inside the bag and touch what was inside. Their predictions changed significantly from the beginning. A lot of students guessed correctly – corn on the cob! Finally, I let students see quickly in the bag and their predictions were confirmed. One of my students said even said, “Miss Gill I still think it is corn on the cob, but it looked black, so are we making rotten popcorn?” I had to chuckle a wee bit here because the corn was deep red as opposed to yellow ;) I revealed the contents and there was a huge “HOORAY” when everyone saw that we were making POPCORN together!!!

But! Before we could get to this stage, as a whole class, we wrote a Procedure by writing down a title, the goal, a list of materials, and the steps/instructions. I have taken a few photographs of this process, please enjoy!

Making a Prediction: "What's in the brown paper bag?"

We predict it's a rock and we will make a rock pet with it!!"

"After we felt inside, we know it's a cob of corn Miss Gill!!"

This was such an engaging and FUN lesson! Ask your child over the weekend what their predictions were when they did a knee-knee, eye-eye with a partner about what they thought we were going to make at the beginning, middle, and end. I also encourage you to do some baking with your child and have them write a simple Procedure using my model (see photograph of my anchor chart for our Procedural Writing for "Making Popcorn"). They need to include the following components:

Title:

Goal:

Materials: You will need:

Steps:

We have our Procedure (recipe) ready!

Put the corn in the microwave for two and a half minutes

Waiting eagerly and patiently!

Pop! Pop! Pop! We hear it Miss Gill :) YAY!

We're ready to gobble our kernels!

Yummy! *note: the students are quite rosy from their snowshoeing prior to this picture ;)

We did it!

Mmmmmdelicious!

Measurement Learning:

As we near the end of our Linear Measurement Unit, I had the students work with a partner to use the metre stick as a benchmark to measure objects in the classroom that were longer, shorter, and equal to 1 metre so they get an understanding and gain the confidence when using this unit of measure. The toughest part was finding something that was equal to 1 metre. We had FUN trying to find this and many students were so, so close! Karina and Kurtis measured the floor to our hand washing sink and it was pretty close to a metre. Alexander found that our classroom window was almost a metre. I modelled putting a bunch of books together to get to 1 metre. We were close numerous times, but found ourselves being 1-2cm longer or shorter than the metre J

On Thursday, we using links to measure around different parts of our body. I taught the students some big words such as “’Circumference, Vertical, and Horizontal lines.” They love when I use ‘big words’ like these! Please reinforce this vocabulary and their meanings at home.