Student-led conferences

Student-led conferences are this Thursday starting at 3:00 pm and Friday morning 8:00-10:00. No appointment is necessary. This is a chance for your child to show you their learning. There is no school Thursday afternoon and Friday. Happy first day of spring!

Visit from the Leprechauns

Last week the students in room 10 decided to plan and create interesting and complex Leprechaun traps. We worked in groups and did an amazing job at collaborating with our peers. We had to create a detailed plan with a materials list before we could get started. Our traps incorporated many different strategies to catch the leprechaun like strings, sticky platforms, balancing beams, trap doors and lots of different types of bait to lure the little guy in. When we arrived on Monday morning to our surprise he had visited our traps but he was way to clever and escaped each one but not without leaving little green foot prints all around the room. He was nice enough to leave us a note and a surprise though. Maybe we will have better luck next year!

Scientific Sketching with Miss. Rebecca Lesson 4

  Today we had our last lesson with Miss. Rebecca. We worked on transferring our sketches into a final draft. Miss Rebecca brought special toned paper into our classroom for them.
  We then worked with a few new tools to complete our work: ultra-fine tipped sharpies and white charcoal. By using our sharpies to carefully outline and stipple, we gave our shadows a very realistic look. Then, we used the white charcoal to show where light would naturally touch our structures. Because the paper we used was toned (a neutral pastel colour), the white charcoal added a lot of depth to the 3D look of our buildings.
  We are so excited to start using our new sketching skills in the rest of our classwork. We will be sketching some artifacts next week using these techniques.

Scientific Sketching with Miss. Rebecca lesson 3

  Yesterday we had our third lesson with Miss. Rebecca. We looked at how a light source like the sun can add light and shadow to our sketches. By using lamps in a dark room, we lit our structures so that we could accurately shade our drawings. We learned that shadows are always on the opposite side of an object from the light. 

  One of the ways that Miss Rebecca taught us to shade was through stippling. We learned that stippling is an artistic technique which uses many tiny dots to give shadow and depth to 3D objects. This is helping us to make our drawings more realistic. It also helps us to consider how an object might cast a shadow.

  The next lesson will be our last with Miss. Rebecca, and we are looking forward to it!

Glenbow Museum

Today room 10 spent the day at Glenbow Museum. We started the morning exploring Picturing the Northwest, historical art from Glenbow's collection. We learned that most people only look at a piece of art for 7 seconds. We know that it takes much longer to understand a story and each painting was telling us a "story". Miss. Amanda (museum teacher) was asking us questions like what shapes and colours do you see? What would you see, hear and smell if you were standing in this painting. How do you feel when you look at the painting? We were then given different feeling words like calm, sleepy, excited, mysterious and we had to find paintings that made us feel like these words. It was so cool seeing all the different painting that each of us choose. Our last task before lunch was to create a piece of art with loose parts that described a specific feeling word that Miss. Amanda gave us. Check out what we created!

We spent the afternoon learning about the historical roots of Calgary and the importance of Farmers and Ranchers to our city. We also learned where the Calgary Stampede came from and how Tom Three Persons was the only cowboy who could tame Cyclone that toughest, wildest horse at the whole Stampede! To end the day we practiced our scientific sketching skills by sketching really cool old rancher artifacts like Bits and spurs.

Grade 1 Literacy Groups

Over the last two weeks grade 1 Student's have been engaging in Literacy Groups amongst the three grade one classes. Here is an update on what each group has been up to: 

Mrs. McCaw’s group is exploring letter sounds through the Jolly Phonics Program. We are working on blending and segmenting letter sounds through the use of songs, actions and visuals. We are also learning about how to form and read sentences by matching sentences to pictures and creating sentences with common scientific vocabulary. We will continue to practice our writing with the help of our Jolly Phonics sound chart. A small copy of the sound chart will be sent home. Have your child tell you about the letter sounds we have learned so far and play with blending and segmenting sounds to form words. 

Ms. Fraser's group is working on sentence structure and making our writing easy to read. We are currently focusing on including finger spaces (spaghetti) and punctuation (meatballs). In the coming weeks we will focus on proper letter formation and sticking our letters to the line, using interesting and descriptive words in our sentences and exploring different kinds of punctuation. Each day we have four tasks that we complete: 

1 - practice using a variety of sentence starters on whiteboards (I see, I like, I can)

2 - read a story and answer comprehension questions 

3 - write about a picture prompt - students look at a picture and write sentences using the starters I see, I think and I wonder 

4 - share our writing with the group - students have the chance to read their work aloud to the group 

Mrs. Pittman’s group is focusing on story writing. We began with generating ideas about what we can write about. Students focused on likes, interests, hobbies and experiences to create their ‘What can I write about page.’ We discussed how authors write about what they know and what they experience. Students created a plan and are working on their ‘sloppy copy.’ We will focus on beginning, middle and ending  and read the beginning of different stories to help students see that often characters and the setting is introduced and it doesn’t always have to start with ‘Once upon a time’ or ‘One day.’ We will focus on adding more content, detail and description to our work as we edit and revise. We will practice making more complex sentences, spelling patterns, word families, sight words and punctuation as mini lessons during our writing process. We plan to spend a significant amount of time on this piece and students are excited to publish their work. When our stories are complete, we will move into non-fiction texts and continue to apply new concepts we have learned.

In Ms. V’s literacy group we have been working on research projects. We are researching animals who live in our community or extended community like: wolves, squirrels, and bats. The group has been learning about categorizing information, asking questions like a scientist, and using tools in non-fiction literature to answer those questions. We will be making final projects in coming weeks to share with our peers.

Exploring Liquids and Solids

Today room 10 explored liquids and solids with Miss. V. Our question was "What will happen when we combine corn starch with water"? Our hypothesis were that the corn starch would dissolve, that it may shrink and that it might expand. Through doing the experiment we discovered that when combining these two materials (one liquid and one solid) that it made a texture that is both a liquid and a solid. When it is in the container it is more of a solid and when you scoop some up it became like a liquid. We called it "goop"! We really liked the cold, smooth feel of it.

Scientific Sketching with Miss. Rebecca Lesson 2

Yesterday we learned how to represent what the texture of something is within our drawings. Our first step was to look closely at a variety of different building materials with magnifying glasses. We were able to see many little details that we had not noticed before. Miss. Rebecca had us draw a circle below our drawing and draw the fine details that we saw through the magnifying glass. Our next step was to draw a smaller circle on the area of our building that we are representing and connect the two circles with a line, showing that this is a zoomed in or macro view of our building.

Scientific Sketching with Miss. Rebecca Lesson 1

This afternoon room 10 students had the opportunity to work with our artist in residence Rebecca Ellison. We learned how to use a tool such as a pencil or pipe cleaner to help us figure out the measurement and scale of our LEGO buildings within a drawing. She had us hold up our pencil and close one eye measuring the longest parts of our structures and using the pencil or pipe cleaner to help us figure out the size it should be on our paper. We also learned to look for the basic shapes of the structure first and add the details later. This is helping us to look at our structures from a different perspective! Lesson 2 is tomorrow, I wonder what we will practice?

* Room 10 is going on a field study to the Glenbow Museum on Monday, March 11, 2019. If you are able to join us as a volunteer please let me know sdmccaw@cbe.ab.ca. Field Trip forms will be coming home tomorrow!