November 2014

Christmas has come and gone and parent/ teacher conferences are completed.  Both students and I should feel very accomplished. I appreciate November as a month when students have settled in, we have established norms in the classroom and the daily "rhythm and harmony" of the classroom has taken over. 

We have been collecting coffee cans since September. It took awhile to gather 26 so that each student could create a drum. However, making drums was a great way to review patterning concepts and check student's understanding. We created a number of patterns and use a pattern book to record and share them. As you can see from the pictures the children were very engaged!

We have been working on comprehension strategies and understanding of story. The Willow Award book "Larf" offered the perfect opportunity to look at character and character traits. We discussed what "inside" and "outside" of a character means and as a final product created a bulletin board depicting ourselves as characters inside and out.

Our school goals are related to math and literacy. We love math and have been working on a number unit. Skip counting is an important number skill and part of the Grade 1 and 2 curriculum. We combined our knowledge of skip counting, problem solving and our math journaling skills to create posters to represent this learning. The posters really are awesome and represent students understanding of these math concepts.

Math games are a fun way to practice the skills we have acquired.