Happy Friday the 13^th Families!

A bit of bad news for all of you who suffer from friggatriskaidekaphobia – all years will have at least one Friday the 13th. The good news is that there cannot be more than three Friday the 13ths in any given calendar year. The longest one can go without seeing a Friday the 13th is 14 months.

Students of Room 51 were excited this week to learn how to draw a boy and a girl, who is not a stick person, during our guided drawing lesson.  This will help the students to better draw a picture of themselves to accompany their secret person character writing.  This, they have been working on throughout the week during the writing portion of our Daily 5.  With what they have been learning about character in stories, they are taking a closer look at themselves to determine their character traits.  Their writing and their full-bodied self-portrait will be displayed on our bulletin board, as we did with their monster assignment.

Mrs. McArthur took the story of, “The Boy Who Cried Wolf” and presented it to our learners through the oral tradition, similar to how stories are told by the First Nations people.  During her retell, students did a visualization of the parable, sketching the story in their visual journals.  This was followed up the next day with a written assignment, where the children had to identify the “boys” character traits and back up their claim with details from the story.  That was a challenging task for all the students.  Ask your child what character traits they discovered the “boy” had and why they think so.

Gymnastics was the rage this week during gym class, with enthusists climbing, rolling, tumbling and balancing their hearts out.  During music, they have been having loads of fun playing musical instruments.

We continued our focus in math this past week working on place value and regrouping through addition practice with numbers up to 50 for the grade ones and with 2-digit numbers up to 100 for the grade two’s.  We also played an addition math game of Bingo on Friday.

The “Blue Days” have had the children confined to the classroom during their lunch recess, but they have enjoyed playing sports charades and creating works of art with or on paper.  Ask your child what they have been doing indoors on their “Blue Days”.

While we continue to work on our STEAM inquiry in science, with our gingerbread theatres, we began a new unit in social studies.  We have begun learning about the people of Iqaluit through discussion, mapping and watching a video.  Ask your child what throat singing is all about.  Maybe they can even show you an example.

We had some special visitors in our classroom this week.  Emily’s grandparents from South Africa joined us during the last 15 minutes of our day on Thursday.  The students asked many questions about where they came from and they asked us about some winters things they were wondering about.

Have a great weekend families!

Room 51