Hello Room 51 families and friends,

Hopefully you are on your way to enjoying a much warmer sunny weekend!

Once again our Friday whipped by, as did the entire week.  The students have been hard at work on so many different things.  Their puppet theatre STEAM projects have turned out beautifully; most of the filming is complete and posted to IRIS. The next step will be using their puppets and the green screen to make fun movies with an assortment of backgrounds.  The students are also engaged in a beautiful art project that is based on the works of Ted Harrison.  They are multi-medium works that involve painting, sewing and yarn and WOW are they looking great!!  We have some amazing little sewers in our room and more on the way next week (speaking of art, we are always thrilled to have volunteers for our Thursday afternoon art projects, or anytime you feel like dropping in).  In math the students are working on addition and subtraction, with and without regrouping, to 100 and beyond; yes the grade 1's are working with some of those great big numbers too.  They are starting to get quicker with their math fact recalls, but can always use more practice so maybe spice up those car rides with some addition math drills :)

There has been a lot of invested non-fiction reading this week as we've started our passion "I Wonder" projects, and research for our Inuit unit.  It's amazing what many of them have managed to find out in a very short period of time.  They have been creating polar bear "wheels of wisdom," and there really is a lot of wisdom showing up!  This week was mission impossible in gym and we also had Club Friday today.  Everyone found their way to their new clubs without incident, and there was a lot of excitement after so though we didn't have much time to talk about the clubs it is definitely sounding like a good time was had by all.

We are still collecting swim forms so please send those back with your children if you have one at home, and if you are able to volunteer for swimming please let us know so that we can sort out our numbers.  We will especially be looking for dad volunteers to help in the boys washroom.

Have a fantastic week,

The 51 team

Spelling Words - January 16-20

Grade 1

than
it
he
was
map
cap
nap
tap

Grade 2

live
cool
give
most
saw
law
raw
jar
straw
draw
country
ocean
title
motion
change

Friday, January 13th

A few more notes...

We did not have the opportunity to do our spelling test, which means that we will do it on Monday morning.  This gives the students a few extra days to study their words.  A list can be found in the envelope pouch on the inside of their communication folders.

SWIMMING

We still have not received all of the "Swimming Ability" forms and/or fees.  Please complete the forms and return it ASAP if you have not done so already.

If you have made a decision to not have your child attend swimming lessons please consider this:

Swimming is a life skill and all students are highly encouraged to participate.  Students who are not swimming will stay at the school and will be supported in another classroom during this time.

Boats and Buoyancy

Please keep collecting and send in any recyclable materials for this unit.  All materials will be pooled together and shared with all students to investigate and create.

Thanks!

Julie & Kim

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

Weekly Spelling Words

Grade 1 List

to
in
is
you
man
can
ran
pan


Grade 2 List

little
work
know
place
years
rain
mail
wait
paint
chant
paid
sail
goods
services
pitch
volume

Happy Friday Families of Room 51!

This week at school we continued working on our STEAM project, creating our paper bag puppet theatres and puppets.  We also started decorating our theatres with paper candies and had to find the total value of the candies we used on our structure.

In Language Arts we added some new words to our vocabulary and had a spelling test on Friday.  We are learning about character and how this includes more than describing the outside of a person or character from a story.  During Daily 5 some us learned about hand signing.

Place Value was the flavor of the week in math.  Grade 1s practiced regrouping with units and rods, while the grade 2s practiced 2-digit addition with regrouping.

Mrs. McBride introduced us to some musical instruments this week in music.  We had so much fun playing drums, sticks, tambourines and triangles and learning some new songs.  In gym the students enjoyed “Island Dodge Ball”, a combination of 2 different Dodge Ball games, using our climbing wall in order to come back to life and go back to an island.

We started “I Wonder”, a passion project where we get to research a topic we are each interested in and write about during the writing portion of our Daily 5 each day.  We went to the library to find books for this project and we will sometimes use the computers to do research as well.

We started a new unit in Social Studies, learning some things about mapping.  Please ask your child what they have learned.

We had some extra help this week in the classroom from Mrs. N and it was Ms. Klein’s birthday.

If you have not already returned the swimming ability form, please do so as soon as possible.

Have a super weekend and stay warm!

Room 51

Hello Room 51 Families,

Earlier this week we sent home a small list of spelling words with the students to practice over the course of the week.  Some students may have lost the list so we have posted them here so they can practice tonight.

Grade 1

the
of
and
that
cat
mat
sat
hat

Grade 2

over
new
art
take
only
car
park
hard
barn
card
shark
dark
oh
eyes
timeline
hold