Happy Hallowe'en!
Students enjoyed seeing all the wonderfully decorated pumpkins and sketching their favourites today.
We also wrote a story together titled Five Little Bats.  We wrote four stanzas together and students then wrote the last stanza on their own.  Ask your child what their bat did in the story.

October 30

Hallowe'en

Hallowe'en is tomorrow.  We are not dressing up in costumes.  Students are encouraged to wear orange and black.

Math
In math today we learned how to play our first math game "Race to 100."  Students used a hundreds board for the game, took turns rolling one die and practiced counting up and numeral recognition as they raced their partner to be the first to reach 100.  Math games are an excellent way to help reinforce numeral recognition, counting skills, subtizing and number operations.

Science
We continued with our exploration of the sense of sight.  Ask your child what teacher they worked with today and what they learned about their sense of sight.

Naturalization Project
If you are interested in assisting with the Naturalization project for Royal Oak school there will be an informational meeting on November 2 at 7:00 pm at the school.

Picture Retakes
Picture Retake day is November 8.

Weather
We go outside daily.  Please make sure that your child is dressed for Calgary's changing weather conditions.

Book Truck
Our class will be visiting the Calgary Public Library Book Truck on November 15.  If you have not sent in your child's library card number please do so before this date.  If you do not have a public library card you may sign up for one on the CPL website or at any branch of the library.

October 25 and 26

Thank you to those parents who donated pumpkins for our pumpkin math project.  Students have had the opportunity to predict which pumpkin would have the most seeds and then use a variety of counting strategies to not only count the seeds but to show their work and prove that their count was correct.  Some students used 1:1 correspondence with hundreds boards, some used a single hundreds board and then grouped into piles 100 with the remainder less then one hundred left on the board, and some grouped into piles of  five or ten to make a quick count possible.  Ask how many seeds were in your child's pumpkin.  As you can see from one of the above pictures, one of the pumpkins had 587 seeds!  Today we used non standardized measurement tools to first estimate and then measure our pumpkins.  We used unified cubes to measure height, string to measure the circumference and our counting ability to count all the lines.  Students also looked closely at the pumpkins to sketch.

I was going to send the pumpkins home tomorrow but many of them are rotting quickly and are beginning to soften and be full of mould inside so I will put them in the composter.  


Volunteer opportunity:

We would like to extend an invitation all interested parents to participate in the new Naturalization Project at Royal Oak School. Our first meeting will be on Thursday, November 2 at 7:00 p.m.  We are hoping to follow a thorough and rigorous process to create a ROS garden/playscape in the Naturalization area in the spring of 2018. Due to the generosity of the ROS Parents, we have seed money which was donated through Casino Funds and the efforts of the parents through the Parent Fundraising Society.

Reminders:
1. Picture order forms are due November 1.  If you require retakes they will be on November 8.  Your  child will need to bring the envelop of original proofs to return to the photographer on this date.  Please also send me an email to let me know that you would like retakes.

October 23

In math today we started counting our pumpkin seeds.  We used a variety of strategies such as taking turns within our groups to count on, using groupings of seeds and using a hundreds board to keep us on track.  We will continue with this tomorrow, checking each others work and asking students to prove what they know.  How can you show someone how many seeds you have?  How do you know you are correct?  How can you prove it?

In literacy centres this week we have started breaking into small groups to focus on specific student needs.  Students will be working within like groups to target specific literacy goals.  Ask your child which teacher they are working with during literacy block.

In Inquiry we have begun to explore our five senses.  Students are rotating in groups between all of the grade one teachers to learn about the sense of sight.  Today our class discovered that it is possible to trick our brains into seeing something different then what is actually there by looking at optical illusions.  In the next while students will be exploring how sight helps us navigate and communicate with the word around us, how people with deficits in sight manage, how animal and human sight differs and how to care for our eyes.



Reminder: On Halloween at Royal Oak School we do not dress up in costumes during the school day, Students are encouraged to dress in orange and black instead.  The Halloween dance is a great opportunity for students to wear their costumes!


Halloween Dance
Family Halloween Dance on Thursday, October 26. Due to the large number of families and limited capacity in the gym, there will be two dances run by School Council one will be from 5:30 – 6:30 p.m. and the other from 7:00 – 8:00 p.m.  An orange sheet was sent home last week, please return it indicating what time slot you will be coming, Dressing up is encouraged!

October 18

Thank  you so much to our parent volunteers who accompanied us on our walk to the Wetlands.  We would not be able to provide your children with these amazing real world learning experiences without your help.  While at the Wetlands students used their five senses to look, listen, feel and smell the world around them.  They then documented those experiences in their visual journal.  Several questions were raised and these will be added to as we work together to discover what we think, see and wonder about.  These wonderings will form the basis of our inquiry into seasonal changes as we document what we already know, what questions we have, form hypothesis and ask questions and finally learn and research to answer the questions we have generated together.

In math we continued to look at identifying attributes and how we can change just two attributes of a shape at a time.  Ask your child whether they changed the colour, shape, size or number of sides of their object.

In reading today we worked on implementing our first decoding strategy, using our "Eagle Eye" to look at the picture for clues to help us decode unknown words in the text.

I'm in need of several pumpkins for math next week.  If you could donate a pumpkin to our class can you please send it with your child tomorrow or Friday.  Thank you for your assistance.

Pumpkins wanted and new teacher

We will be using pumpkins next week to work on our math skills of measurement, estimating, sorting and counting.  If you are able to send in a pumpkin please do so this Thursday or Friday.  I will need six for our math study.

New Grade 1 Teacher
-Royal Oak School is happy to welcome Mr. Pereira to our Grade 1 team. Mr. Pereira spent the day with Ms. Barley’s class today. He will be taking over for Ms. Barley as she goes onto maternity leave.  Her last day will be on Wednesday this week.  We wish her all the best with her exciting venture with her new little one.

Volunteer Needed

Volunteer Opportunity

We are decorating a pumpkin to be displayed at the Royal Oak Sobeys.  Our class brainstormed what they would like to do and then voted for their favourite choice.  We will be decorating our pumpkin like a princess.  I am looking for a parent volunteer with current security clearance to come in and help us with this.  There is no carving involved!!  Please let me know if you are available this Tuesday to assist. 

Thank you!