Hello November! (and Winter??)

Well, we're into the third month of school already! I had a very busy day planned for the students today as I wanted some additional work samples for parent teacher interviews this week. The first task that we tackled was doing some self assessments. I love hearing the students reflect on their learning and getting their perspective on what they feel they are good at or what they need to work on in the future.

At our classroom meeting, I read a social story about not interrupting people who are talking. We are working on it. With it being the first day back at school after the Halloween weekend, they were definitely very chatty today! So, we will see if reminders from the story help us with respectful listening and not talking over one another. We also had a good discussion when it came to our Weather Report and what season it is now. They were convincing me that it must be winter because it's so cold outside, it is snowy outside now, and the leaves are all gone. So, with that reasoning, I think it's time to change our Owl Behavior Tree and our Season picture to Winter! When I was on supervision at recess, I had to agree with them; it does feel like Winter out there in Saskatchewan today!

We worked in our journals today. The topic was what the student wanted to be when they grew up. They had to write "when I grow up" and the date "Nov. 4" in their journal, draw a picture, and then dictate the rest of the sentence for me to write in their journal. I also took pictures of all of them holding a sign that says their future goal on it, which I'm hoping to put into a collage. So what do they want to be when they grow up? A lifeguard, batman, cat woman, someone who builds obstacle courses, a dentist, a mail person, superman, and one said that he wanted to be like his dad (aww).


With Remembrance Day coming up, we had some discussions about what the day is all about. I decided to come from the perspective of remembering the men and women who died fighting in the wars so that we could have peace. Then, we attempted to close our eyes and visualize what peace means to us. Finally, students wrote the words "Peace is" on a paper that I created, they drew a picture, and then dictated their thoughts about what peace is. I put their thoughts together to create a poem..

Peace Is...

quiet flowers

sharing

holding hands, walking on the sidewalk

the sun, clouds, and flowers

talking peacefully

making flowers

playing by myself and being quiet

flowers, water, sunshine, and submarines.

 

 

 



We finished up our pumpkin observations today. I read a short non-fiction write up about pumpkins (shown above). We added a little bit to our OWL chart, which showed what we had observed before our investigations, what they wanted to learn, and then what they learnt over the past few weeks. We looked through out observation booklets to self assess how well we used our sense of sight to create sketches of our pumpkins and to discuss what changes our pumpkins went through over the six weeks. Then, we looked at the difference between a pumpkin that was still really healthy, one that was starting to mold, and the one that I cut up on Halloween that was not very pretty at all! I wish I had taken a picture of it, but after everyone reluctantly observed the differences, I wanted to throw it out right away!

For our word study, we tried out a new way to practice spelling our words:

It was a lot of fun!

 

 

Finally, we had to play I Have, Who Has? and Fastest Letter in the West, as we didn't have time earlier and they LOVE these games. Our last job was to work on our This is Me in November pictures, which I'm using to track their progress with drawing and printing throughout the year. It's exciting to see a lot of progress from their This is Me in September  pictures. :)

 

So, there you have the main highlights from our day. This month we will begin our unit on the numbers one to five and an exciting Who Am I? unit! I'm very much looking forward to it.

 

Happy Monday Everyone!