This morning we came back refreshed from a relaxing weekend. It was so nice seeing all of our well rested students this morning. We wrapped up the month of August, but counting all of the days of the month using ordinal numbers (first, second third...). We are excited to start September tomorrow. Together, we ordered numbers from 0-20. Remember when you are working with numbers or practicing counting skills at home to start with 0 and not one. This will assist your child in the future in math. After working with written numbers, we learned about tallies. We discussed why we use tallies (to collect data quickly), and why we cross the 5th tally (to make it easier to read, and add up later). As a class, we tallied our favorite foods, and pets we have at home. Practice tallying things at home, such as outcomes of rock-paper-scissors, or rolling a dice. In Language Arts, we reviewed the alphabet and the sounds each letter makes by watching the alpha blocks. These videos can be found on youtube and are a fun way for your child to interact with phonics. Please see the attached video. Afterwards, we continued to work on reading stamina, we are at 5 minutes now! Following our reading, we learned the 7 high-frequency words that we will master this week: a, you, I, little, find, see, two. Please work on these at home nightly until your child can read them. Try searching for these words in your child's home reading book, or bedtime story. High-frequency words make up the majority of the words a child will read. If your child can recognize these words easily, they will be able to focus less on decoding and more on comprehension. During our UOI time, we read the book, "The Crayon Box that Talked." This book is about differences and diversity. It shows children that life is better with more colors, and when we cooperate we are capable of making a beautiful picture. Students were then instructed to draw the same picture using just one colour, and one using many (where the crayons cooperated). Here is an example of how they turned out. Life is just better with many colours who work together. Once we completed this activity, we made a "friendship web." students were asked to say one thing that they liked (place, games, sport, activity), and then find someone who enjoyed the same thing as them. When they found someone that had a similar interest, they passed them the string. The string continued to get passed along the class into quite the tangled web. This showed us that while we are all different, there are many similarities that connect us in our classroom community. You can see photos of our web of interests below.
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ASA First GradersWe are caring, balanced , reflective, openminded, risk-taking, knowledgeable, principled, thinkers, communicators, inquirers, explorers and learners. Mr. Mason McCormickI am: a husband, teacher, friend, researcher, grad student, mulitliteracies specialist, designer, social media fanatic, lover of all things tech, creative, and progressive. I am an energetic, life-loving, no-nonsense person; passionate about respectful, rigorous, and relevant teaching and learning in the 21st century.
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