Ahoy There, Matey!

Long time no blog, I know. I’m sorry. I’ve been pretty busy lately. My attention has been snagged by house buying and cancer curing, so my blogging had to take the sacrifice and be put on hold for close to a month!

Yes…Rob and I spent Easter weekend running back and forth to the real estate office signing papers. It’s now official. 42 days ‘til move in; but who’s counting?

And what’s this about me curing cancer? Well I haven’t actually cured it, but I’m doing my part! I’ve been running Relay for Life for the past 8 years, but since my dad died of cancer three years ago, I’ve decided to kick it into high gear and raise as much as I can for my team. I organized and threw a dance, invited friends and family, hired a Rolling Stones tribute band, and raised over $4000!

But now that the house buying and cancer curing has settled down, it’s time to regain focus on what’s been going on in Grade One.

We finished our units on heroes, structures, and subtraction, and started super fun units on communities, pirates, probability, and mapping!

The Grade Ones have to learn about the local community, so we started off (as I always like starting off) by brainstorming what we already know.

And we learned about what our community was like when it was first founded, and discussed the idea that communities change over time.

Cute story time:

Me: What do you think Georgina looked like 195 years ago when William Bourchier discovered the area?

Boy: I think everything was in black and white.

Someone’s seen a few old movies.

Anyways. The idea of a community has been the starting point for everything else in the other units. I can’t take any of the credit for these upcoming amazing ideas. Back when I was a student teacher, Melissa and Stacia planned this terrific unit on pirates. We tied in the ideas of community and working together. It was such a fun unit, I decided to do it again with my own kiddos.

The kids now sit in “pirate ships” which is essentially three desk groups of six. They have to work as a community and demonstrate strong teamwork skills.  I, of course, am the captain ;)

Pirate books have become the main texts for our literacy unit.

This week, we have started looking at character and setting. These are some books we’ve read so far:

There are SO many pirate adventure stories out there and they’re fantastic. The kids totally love acting like pirates. Even during morning and afternoon attendance they say, “Arrrgh, Captain Lawrence!” instead of, “Here”.

We all know that pirates need maps to find their buried treasure. So we’ll be learning all about positional language and the relative location of objects. At the same time, we’ll be learning about probability. We’ve had lots of fun with some pirate spinner games that I created. Click HERE for a free copy.

Finally, we have a wonderful CYW (Child and Youth Worker) at our school who comes in each week to teach my onesies about various life skills. Lately, she’s been teaching them about manners and how to be kind to one another. She read them this hit of a book.

Then they made their own buckets, where they can leave  kind comments to one another and fill each other’s buckets. What a great way to build that sense of community.

Well, that’s it from me. I’ll leave you with a picture of our pirate name flags we made in aaaaarght. I mean, art.

Being a Hero and Making a Difference

April is all about being a hero here in Grade One. When I was a student teacher, the primary team I worked with created a wonderful unit all about being a hero and making a difference. It was such an engaging unit and it fit in so nicely with other curriculum areas that I wanted to give it another try.

Our big idea is: Everyone can be somebody’s hero

Here's what we know:

This is what we’re learning to do:

We began by learning all about Alexander Graham Bell. We learned how his invention of the telephone changed the lives of so many people. We learned a new word (determined) and proved that Bell was a determined person for so many reasons. How was he determined, you ask? Well take a look at what one of my kiddos was able to write:

I’m just so happy with how far they have come with their writing abilities! {Don't mind that it's not finished. We ran out of time!}

The heroes unit will tie in nicely with our new science unit on Structures and Materials. We will look at a variety of structures that have been built that have made a difference in people’s lives. Thanks to Alexander Graham Bell, communicating with each other is that much easier!

In math, we have started subtracting. There are many different ways to subtract, and I hope that they will explore the many ways on their own and use what works best for them; but to start them off, we really focused on the “taking away” and “counting back” strategies. By the end of the week, they were pros.

Now, back to being a hero.

On Wednesday it was Autism Awareness Day, and our autism community class put on a wonderful assembly to teach our school all about autism. I didn’t want my young ones going in and being confused, so I took some time to teach them myself about autism. Through some Googling, I came across this Arthur video called, “When Carl Met George”. It’s all about how George meets and befriends a boy with Aspergers Syndrome. Very kid-friendly and…come on…Arthur rocks!

{Click the picture to go to the YouTube video)

The puzzle piece is used to symbolize the complexity and mysterious nature of autism, so I had each student cut out a puzzle piece and write down how they can be a good friend to someone with autism. These little heroes can make a big difference in someone else’s life simply by being understanding and caring people.

Every year, I run Relay for Life and in the past few years, I’ve put a lot of effort into raising a lot of money for my team. Cancer is one of those horrible diseases that seems to have affected just about everyone to some degree. It’s touched my family a few times now and I want to do all that I can to raise awareness to those who need the support.

I was in the office of the Canadian Cancer Society the other day and I realized that the month of April is the month of their daffodil campaign! My students already know quite a bit about cancer since we discussed it in September before the Terry Fox run. We had another chat about it and talked about how the daffodil symbolizes hope and new beginnings. We made an art lesson out of it and using coffee filters, cupcake paper cups, and yellow paint, we made our very own daffodils. Once they’ve had time to dry over the weekend, I’ll mould them into the shape of a flower and tape them up all over the classroom. We may not have raised any money for the Canadian Cancer Society, but we’ve certainly raised more awareness among a very young group of children.

That’s all for now. I’m going to leave you with this picture that I received on Friday. It’s a little reminder about why I love what I do so much!

 See? Everyone can be somebody's hero!

Springing into Fun

Good morning, everyone. Despite the fact that it was a very busy week, and that I stayed up way too late last night, I still for some reason woke up around 7:30 this morning. My body seems to be a little confused. Hopefully after all the turkey I’m about to ingest this weekend, my body will desire nice long sleep ins and naps on the couch. But for now, I’ll use this quiet, alone time to fill you in on our week in Grade One.

Due to the PA Day on Friday, it was a short week at school. We also had a field trip (I’ll talk about that later), so there wasn’t a lot of time to get stuff done. Thankfully, my kiddies were great and worked really hard to do as much as possible.

This week was all about spring! We had a springtime poem for our shared reading every morning, and we learned more about how to visualize, and what sound the long o makes. One little guy took the initiative to circle the punctuation marks, so that we wouldn’t forget to read with expression :)

We only had time for one read aloud this week in our literacy block, so I read them Fletcher and the Springtime Blossoms. It’s about how a little fox named Fletcher is frolicking through the apple orchard one spring day, when all of a sudden, he sees snow! He runs around to all his friends to warn them that winter isn’t over yet, and that they need to go back into hibernation. They all end up back at the orchard, only to find out that the snowflakes were actually beautiful, white blossoms.

That was an experienced grown up version of a retell. My kidlets are also working on retells, but my expectations are not as high. As promised, here is the success criteria we are using for this unit:

On Wednesday, my Grade Ones paired up with Mr. D’s Grade 7/8 class to give reading buddies a try. We had been planning this since September, and were both a little nervous because we weren’t sure all the kids would buy into it. He was afraid his kids would think it was dumb, and I thought my kids wouldn’t focus on the task. Boy, were we wrong. Every one of my kids sat still and read their books for the entire time. The 7 and 8s did an amazing job working with my kids, helping them with tricky words, and asking them questions that really help build critical thinking skills. I had given my colleague this document because they are the reading strategies that I use with my kids. 

The kid friendly language makes it a lot of fun for them to remember. I got these from Cara Caroll over at TheFirst Grade Parade. You can download the file from here. After reading buddies, we walked back to our class, and one boy said to me, “Can we do that every day? It’s such a nice way to make new friends”. My heart basically melted right to the floor.

On Thursday, we jumped on a bus (well, we actually walked and sat down quietly because that’s how you ride a bus safely :P) and headed to the Safety Village. It was SUCH a great field trip. The kids got a little lesson from Officer Greg, who taught them all about the traffic lights and crosswalk signals. Then, they went out to this little closed course village, and drove battery operated jeeps on the little roads, learning how to obey traffic signs. I was able to get a picture of all of them, but I can’t share them here. Just trust me-it was the cutest thing ever. When we got back to school, I had to wake a few of them up on the bus (more than one attempt was needed), and we discussed our favourite parts of the day. I laughed at how many of them loved taking a bus!

We said farewell and Happy Thanksgiving, and I headed to a PA Day the following day. I’ll keep this part short. It was a lot of PD in the morning, but in the afternoon we had time to plan with our grade partners. Philippa and I sat down and pretty much got November and December planned. We have two very rich and engaging units coming up, and we are so excited to get started. You’ll have to wait and see what’s in store, but trust me-it’s going to be lots of fun.

Here's a quick look at some other topics we covered this week

A great read aloud to teach kids about how we have to change and adapt to the different seasons

A cute story about what animals do during the winter time to adapt to the cold weather

This is new to our math wall. It shows what we are learning to do in our patterning unit

I hope everyone has a Happy Thanksgiving! For some of you, a happy Eid!