We continued this week with our investigation of money, which ties in with our current unit, How We Organize Ourselves. We have been adding up coins to different values and some students are able to add coins to values over one dollar. Please help your child continue to count by/add in 5's, 10's, 20's and 50's, as this will benefit them when adding coins together. Next week we will explore rounding, in relation to money. Students also worked together to create a system/rules to help our Swap Shop run smoothly and effectively. However, only 4-5 students have brought items in to swap. We will be opening our Swap Shop on Monday, so students are encouraged to bring in an old toy or book or something they don't need anymore, or something they've made (of course checking with parents first!). Please talk with your child about the Swap Shop. We have been discussing value, and it is interesting to hear what students value and are willing to swap. We have been using the Chrome Books to record our understanding of the central idea throughout our unit. The students have each been working in Google Slides. This week we learned that information can be gathered in many different ways, and we listened to a Brain Pop video to help in our research of the Silk Road. Students recorded important information on sticky notes and then we worked together to answer these questions: * What was the Silk Road? * What things were exchanged on the Silk Road? * How does exchange help communities? * Is exchange always fair? We also finished up recording information in a table from our book walk, taking note on what kinds of exchanges were taking place in different books, both fiction and non-fiction. In writing, we have been exploring procedural writing (instructions). Students have examined their own writing, along with their peers', and created a list of essential elements when writing directions. Some of these include a title, putting steps in order, starting each step on a new line, using time order words and/or numbers. We will continue next week with mini lessons on adding detail and developing our ideas. Students picked their first Daily 5 Cafe goal this week as we have been working hard to use various strategies in our reading. Some students decided they needed to work on comprehension, while others thought they should work on accuracy, fluency or expanding their vocabulary. Next week, 3 Way Conferences are on Wednesday. Please sign up for a time slot if you have not done this already. Remember, children do not come to school for a normal school day. They accompany you to the conferences where they will share their goals and we will look at the progress they have made so far this year. A few reminders: Please help your child in learning to be responsible! It is their job to bring their bag to school, hang it up, and put their lunch and folder away. Please do not do this for your child, as they know and understand the morning routines, and are fully capable of doing this themselves. Please also note that even though snack time is not an explicit learning time, it can be a disruption when parents are popping in and out. Please send your child with healthy snacks to school. Candy, cookies and cake are not appropriate snack choices. Children benefit from healthy snacks such as meat, cheese, yogurt, crackers, fruit and vegetables. This type of food gives your child the energy they need and the ability to focus throughout the school day. Please help your child remember to bring something for the Swap Shop, opening on Monday! Thanks and have a great weekend, Ms. Luttrell
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On Math Day, we had to think a lot! We did Mathletics in the computer lab. We played a game about math. We needed to roll the dice and add the numbers. Whoever had the biggest number moved up the tower. Raffles and Newton tied with 20 points. On Math Day we did lots of addition and subtraction. We did math things in PE. We didn't have an assembly, because we had math games to do in class. We played a new game called Kaboom! - Grade 2.1
We did a pyramid game in PE. - James Yesterday in math we pasted paper coins in our journals. - Odemar We played math games. - Kento We did half and doubles and half for even and double for odd on the cards. - Joe In Mandarin, we practiced how to say our countries and then the teacher put on a song in Chinese. It was about countries and we needed to practice singing it with our groups. - Kaya Yesterday we do work on writing and today. - Alik In Daily 5, I read Dinosaurs Before Dark and read up until Chapter 9. - Advay In Library, we had a fire drill. During the fire drill, we were very quiet. - Emilia We skip counted with numbers and used the number chart to help us skip count. - Lizzie At school, we had PE. We used some hula hoops and put them in a triangle shape. We put dice in them and then we lined up in groups of our house teams and tried to get to the top of the pyramid to win. - Rajananta In Art, we are making Aboriginal art from Australia. We were making dots too. It was fun. - Marin We had Library yesterday and we read a math book. - Hakim We did money. - Joe In Art, we painted Aboriginal paintings. - Carmella We had Library, and we read a book about Math. We heard a fire drill. It was a practice. - Jasmine As a reminder, please continue to send cutlery with your child for snack/lunch. We are trying to reduce the amount that is thrown away each day. We will continue investigating money, and many students wanted to bring in money from their home or other countries to show their classmates. Have a fantastic weekend, Ms. Luttrell In math, we started the week with some work on Mathletics. Please remember to keep practicing at home, as there are sometimes assigned tasks based on student need. We explored doubling and halving. Students looked for connections between the two concepts. We also played several math games, which reinforced these concepts and reviewed odd and even numbers. Please continue to work with your children at home on doubling and halving. This will be important as we move into money. Students participated in the thinking routine called, 'Chalk Talk'. There were 4 tables, each with a different question or statement. Students worked silently to respond to each other's questions and comments and then recorded their own ideas in their math journal before sharing with the class. Students responded to: * Money is... * Money is important because... * Questions and wonderings about money * How does money connect to our new unit of inquiry? We also looked at various coins and recorded our thoughts about what we noticed. Next week we will continue examining the value of coins and work to create equal amounts. In literacy, we continued exploring complete vs. incomplete sentences and recognised sentences could be long or short, but needed to have a subject and verb. Students went on a work hunt to locate verbs in books, and then used these verbs in their own sentences. Next week we will look at verb tenses, as well as simple vs. complex sentences. Most students are able to identify the needed components for a complete sentence; however, many students are unable to apply this knowledge consistently in their writing yet. When investigating our central idea, groups worked together to use a dictionary to find the definition of a certain word: exchange, systems, help or community. We learned that dictionaries can help us learn how to spell a word and they can also help us learn what a word means. Students used the Chrome Books and Slides to capture their thoughts and ideas about the central idea. We will continue to add to this project throughout the unit. Students also participated in a 'book walk', exploring various books that connected to our unit. They identified pictures, words and topics that they thought might relate to our unit. As a part of our Unit 2 Inquiry, we are exploring exchange systems. We will be having a "Swap Shop" in late October. Over the holiday break, we would like for students to bring an item or two that they might like to swap with another student. Items that be brought in are ones that don't get played with anymore or don't seem to have a use anymore. They could also be things the student has made. We ask that the students bring their item(s) by 26th October. Thursday afternoon, we practiced the parade of nations in preparation for International Day on Friday. Friday was filled with fun, as the middle and high school students worked to share information in fun ways with the students through various workshops. We also rotated through classrooms where we learned about Japan, the United States of America, and Greece. It was a fun filled day, which ended with the fabulous food buffet. We will not be giving homework over the holidays, but please continue to read with your child. When we return to school after the holidays, our first day back is on the 21 October (a Wednesday). World Maths Day is on Friday, and as we will be doing various math activities on this day, our normal routines for this first week back may be altered - Words Their Way will begin again the following week on the 26th. Please remember to send your child to school with cutlery, as we are working to save the plastic and recycling the containers. Students who have a decent amount of lunch left over are being encouraged to take it home, in case they want to finish it later or share with their family. We also ask that students bring in their own headphones or earbuds, if they haven't done so already. These can be kept in their cubbies and used when we need sound on the Chrome Books. Have a relaxing break, Ms. Luttrell It's been a busy week playing catch up from last Friday, as well as trying to manage being inside all day! It's hard for Grade 2 students to not be able to run around outside, but they made the best of it, really showing their creativity by making tickets and putting on a play for other students. Others chose to play board games, make masks and things out of paper and build with blocks. We used GoNoodle and some other dance videos to get the wiggles out throughout the day. We now have a set of Chrome Books for Grade 2 to share. These computers will be used for math, reading, writing, listening to reading and many unit of inquiry tasks. We had one lesson this week with Mr. Gallagher about proper handling and care of the Chrome Books and then students uploaded a piece from PE to their portfolio. We are asking that students bring in their own headphones or ear buds to keep in their cubby for individual use. This way, they are able to be responsible for their use and care. You could also label them with a piece of tape/students name around the cord. Grade 2 has started to notice the amount of waste each day with school lunches. The plastic lunches from school are often just thrown away at the end of lunch, rather than recycled. We have started rinsing them out in order for them to be recycled after eating. Another way we can help save materials is by using our own utensils for lunch. We are asking that Grade 2 students bring their own cutlery to school if they are eating hot lunch. They can rinse and wash these items at school for use the next day, or bring them each day, whichever they prefer. This would cut down on a great deal of waste. We will be keeping track of the amount that are not used, as this will definitely add up! In math we have been reviewing skip counting by 2's, 5's, 10's and then some other numbers like 3's and 4's. We've practiced counting forward and backwards, starting and stopping at different numbers. We reviewed doubling and identified it's form and function. When doubling, we used a doubling diamond. Ask your child if they can show you this helpful trick. Next week, we will begin to explore money. Students finished writing thank you notes to the Grade 9 drama students who came a few weeks ago to put on some short plays for us. We will send these through inter-school mail. The thank you letters students wrote to Dr Chris, thanking her for Skyping with us and teaching us about sign language, will be mailed on Friday. Hopefully the haze will be low enough, so we can walk to the post office in Ion. We continued working on summarising when reading stories, as some students are still having difficulty identifying the main/most important ideas. This week we didn't have Words Their Way, as we were spending time looking at complete vs. incomplete sentences, as well as verbs. We will continue our investigation into present, past and future tenses next week. We also revisited our old Words Their Way words and used them in different activities. We took apart the letters of some longer words and tried to see how many different words we could make with those letters. This might also be something fun to do at home. We started our second unit: How We Organise Ourselves this week. Students began by unpacking the central idea, identifying words they knew, didn't know, and felt were important. We will look at these words more deeply in the dictionary next week and take a picture walk through various unit related books. Our student council members, Emilia and James, had their first student council meeting on Wednesday. We are excited to hear and see what Student Council does this year! We ended the week with PE, Mandarin and our assembly on Friday. Hopefully the haze will be gone next week. Remember, next Friday is International Day! Have a great weekend, Ms. Luttrell Notes: Please send your child to school with reusable cutlery if they have school hot lunch (and home lunch), and please send them with headphones/earbuds for use each day at school. |
AuthorWe are 7 and 8 year old students who live in Singapore. Our teacher, Ms. Luttrell, will be helping us write blog posts throughout the year! Archives
June 2016
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