October 5

We've had a very busy week! Yesterday the students participated in the Terry Fox run. We had an opportunity all week to learn about Terry Fox and the courage he demonstrated when he did his Marathon for Hope. The students ran with popsicle sticks and had them marked every time they completed a lap. 
When we came inside we counted up all the laps our class completed using tallies.  Our class completed 84 laps!We wrote an acrostic poem about Thanksgiving and the things in our lives that we are thankful for.  
We looked more closely at the attributes of objects.  This understanding will lead us deeper into our investigations of patterns and creating logic trains. 
We used the iPad minis to log into IRIS and post our first learning artifact.  We uploaded our September independent writing sample.  If your child was absent that day we chose a writing sample from our writing journals.  The writing journals are not independent work at this time of year for most of the grade one students.  
Your child brought home instructions on how to log into IRIS to view their learning artifact.  As the year progresses students will be setting learning goals and documenting their progress in IRIS.  
Your child also brought home a list of sight words and in most cases a small sheet of what they are currently working on in terms of letters, letter sounds and early numeracy skills.  Please help them practise these at home.  

Some notes:

Leaves:We are collecting leaves for art and science, if you have some non-crunchy leaves you could donate to our class it would be appreciated.  We would need these for next Wednesday.
Homereading​There have been several questions about home reading so hopefully this helps answer them.-Home reading books are changed every Tuesday and Thursday.  Books may be kept until your child is able to read them fluently.  That means they should be able to ready the book and sound like they do when speaking.  -There is a small blue book that is an excellent communication tool to record which books were read and feedback if it was too hard, easy or just right. -The students are supposed to read the books to you, and answer questions about the books. The white sheet in their book bags has wonderful strategies and suggestions to help your children.  Answering questions about what they have read and making connections helps to build comprehension skills.  

Have a wonderful long weekend.