100s CARPET SPELLING

Using our 100s carpet to come up with verbs ending in "-ing"

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WRITING LETTERS TO SHUAI IN BEIJING, CHINA

For Chinese New Year, I set up a video chat between my student, Shuai, in China and my grade 1/2 class. Shuai taught the class all about Chinese New Year and was able to show them traditional "Dumplings" and answer a few of their questions.

The class decided to write Shuai thank you letters for his help :) We connected with the Canada Post and were able to bring in a representative to collect all our letters and stamp to send them all the way to Beijing, China :)

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SANTA LETTERS

Grade 1 students wrote personalized Santa letters to the North Pole. They drafted, revised, edited, finalized and then sealed into an enveloped addressed to Santa :) -Dec 2018

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100th Day of School Book Reading Challenge

For our 100th Day of School challenge, our grade 1 & 2 class teamed up with their grade 4 & 5 reading buddies to see if they could read 100 books during our Reading Buddy class time. We were able to read 68 books!!! The class was still pretty proud and excited :)

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WORD WORK WALL

Every 2 weeks, students select 10 words from their grade sight word list. This becomes their "pocket words" for the next two weeks. These words are used for homework and during Daily 5. On Friday we have a "pre-test", then a "final test" the following Friday.

W.O.W
​Word of Week

​Each week the classroom has a goal that we strive towards, whether it's "getting along", "showing initiative", "playing fair" etc... I decided to make the students a BIG part of the weekly goals!
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Each Monday we discuss what our goal is (either I provide one I think is a good choice for that week or we come up with one together). 
​We have started using our door as our "WORD OF THE WEEK" wall. 
I try to use NEW vocabulary to stretch those young minds and really get them thinking. We ponder a bit about what the word might mean or where its from, then we spell it out and Google its definition. Throughout the week I ask them to look for examples of our Word-of-the-Week being used in the classroom and then provide those examples on the wall.  

​My favourite word right now is one that is also new to me- "Mudita". It means unselfish joy for another. I wanted a word that represented good thoughts for others, pride for another and no self-pity because that week we announced who our TWO winners were for our cake recipe challenge. Out of 30+ students, so I knew there would be a few sad faces in the crowd. We discussed the word "Mudita" and that it means to feel happy for someone else, that maybe you weren't picked this time- but your friend was! And that's exciting!

​OUR CLASSROOM AGREEMENTS

​​As an entire class we got together and formed a round table meeting about classroom rules. We talked about the importance and history of the round table, then began our open discussion about what sort of rules we would like to implement into the classroom. 

We thought "Agreements" was more appropriate to our willingness to respect ourselves and one another in the classroom and that "rules" sounded too forceful and involuntary.

OUR CLASSROOM AGREEMENTS
1. Appreciation
2. Be helpful
3. Appreciation: No put downs
4. Mutual Respect
5. Attentive listening

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