Sept 26 - Sept 30

Good afternoon everyone.  I hope you all had a great and relaxing weekend.  There are a few very important things to run by you.  First, I am not at school tomorrow, Tuesday, Sept 27th, and there will be a sub for the day.  Second, picture day is this Wednesday, Sept 28th.  A note is going home tomorrow regarding sibling pictures as well. If you would like your child dressed up for pictures, they are taking place in the morning on Wednesday. Friday we also have the Strathcona Ceremonial Mounted Troops performing.  The performance will be happening regardless of weather and there is rain in the forecast.  Please dress your child accordingly.


Language Arts

Phonics:

This week in phonics we will begin unit 2. Unit 2 is a number of exercises that focus on short vowels.  As the phonics works with the spelling words, we are covering the short "o" and short "u" wprds in spelling this week.

Writing:

We recently began our writing program called empowering writers.  It is a program where each month has a different theme and will focus on specific areas to develop writing skills. The theme of the first month is "back to school".  The main focus of our writing this month is identifying the two main forms of writing, Informative/Expository writing and Narrative writing. The purpose of informative/expository writing (generally called non fiction) is to inform the reader. To give them information.  The purpose of narrative writing (generally called fiction) is to tell a story and entertain. The students have been learning differences between the two forms of writing and what to look for to identify them. We will also continue with our weekly journals. If you ever want to see your child's journal you can send me a quick message in their agenda and I can send it home with them.


Math

We are working very diligently in our number sense unit to start the year.  We have done lots of work on representing numbers and also looked at number words to twenty. We also started creating word problems using the number words that we were recently studying.  This week we will be discussing ordinal words (1st - first, 2nd-second, 3rd-third, 10th-tenth, etc), as well as counting and numbers to 100.

Science

As you may already know in science we have discussed that magnets have two poles, north and south.  The students should be using the words attract and repel when describing what same poles (N and N or S and S) will do when they come together and what opposite poles (N and S) will do when they come together. We have also been discussing types of magnets.  There are electromagnets (magnets created using electricity), permanent magnets (magnets that will never lose their magnetic field), and temporary magnets (magnets that will lose their magnetic field). We will be experimenting with creating a temporary magnet this week using a magnet and scissors.  The students are going to have a great time.

Social

We continue our mapping review unit and will be wrapping it up shortly.  We have continued to explore different maps, such as street maps, floor plans, and outside maps. The students are using a saying that works best for them to remember the directions of the compass rose (Never Eat Soggy Waffles) with north pointing up.  We have looked at map keys/legends as well as signs and symbols.  The students are becoming experts and reading and labeling maps.  We will be writing our mapping unit test at the end of this week or early next week.



I hope everyone has a lovely week ahead.  Enjoy the sunny warm weather while you can as it looks like some cooler wet weather is in the forecast.

Mr. Aasen