Latke Recipe

As promised, here is the Latke recipe. This was adapted from a recipe from Chow. Enjoy!

Ingredients:

2 1/2 pounds Idaho, russet, or baking potatoes (about 4 large), scrubbed

1 large onion, peeled and quartered

2 large eggs, separated

3 tablespoons matzoh meal (or all purpose flour)

1 to 2 teaspoons sea salt

Freshly ground pepper

Corn, canola, or vegetable oil for frying

Instructions:

1. Line a large baking sheet with two layers of paper towels; set aside.

2. Using the coarse holes on a handheld box grater or the medium coarse shredding disk of a food processor, shred the potatoes and onion together. Transfer potato onion mixture to a large colander set over a bowl.

3. Using both your hands, squeeze the potato mixture vigorously, as if you're wringing out a pair of wet socks. Squeeze as much liquid as possible out of the potatoes, letting the moisture drip through the holes of the colander. Once you have finished squeezing, let mixture stand for a minute or two.

4. Lift colander out of the bowl. Pour off the watery brown liquid in the bowl, but save the layer of pale beige paste at the bottom. (This chalky looking stuff is potato starch, and you need it to help your latkes stick together.) Scrape up the paste, dump in the potato mixture, and mix together with a large spoon.

5. Mix in egg yolks, matzoh meal, 1 teaspoon of the sea salt, and a good amount of freshly ground

pepper with your hands until it is evenly incorporated.

6. Pour egg whites into a clean, dry bowl. Using a balloon whisk or a handheld electric mixer, beat egg whites until they hold stiff, shiny peaks. Using a rubber spatula or large spoon, gently fold the egg whites into the potato mixture.

7. Pour oil into a large, heavy skillet (preferably cast iron) to a depth of 1/2 inch. (You can also try it outside.) Over medium/high heat, heat oil until a shred of potato mixture instantly sizzles when dropped in. Fry a quarter sized “test latke” first to check for seasoning, and add more salt or pepper as needed. Then, without crowding, spoon potato mixture into the oil, flattening each generous spoonful into a flat disk.

8. Let fry until deep golden brown, about 5 minutes, then flip over and continue frying until both sides are well browned, about 8 to 10 minutes for each batch. (You may need to add additional oil to fry subsequent batches.) Using a spatula, transfer latkes to the paper towel lined baking sheet. Blot any excess oil with additional towels. 

Serve immediately with sour cream and applesauce. Makes approximately 15 latkes.

Twentieth Street's Winter Concert Tomorrow!

Tomorrow is the big day! Most of the students from Twentieth St. School and participants of the Parenting and Literacy Centre will be performing holiday songs that will be sure to bring a smile to everyone's faces during this festive, and often stressful, time.

Please be advised that students from Room 214 are asked to arrive no later than 6:15pm and will then immediately report to Room 214. Parents/Guardians can then make their way down to the gym as supervision will be provided to students upon arrival at their classroom. If students would like to wear something red, green, or both, that would be great too!

Unfortunately, I will not be in attendance tomorrow evening due to extenuating circumstances but I'm sure the students will shine and I am very proud of them all!

~ Mr. Smith

Thank You for the Food Donations!

This post is just to thank all those who have helped to contribute to the mountain of food room 214 has collected so far for the Holiday Food Drive here at 20th St. Our classroom has already filled one recycling bin and it's only the beginning of December! Ms. Mitchell has told us recently that we have collected more than any other classroom in the school!

This month the character education focus is on caring and kindness. This generosity helps students to see that this time of year is all about helping those in need, not the presents they want. We have discussed this many times in our classroom but please have a discussion at home about the difference between wants and needs. I think it is a good starting point to talking about presents at this time of year.

Thanks again and please keep the food donations coming!

We need to empty this bin!

A Virtual Tour of What's New in Room 214...

In the last few weeks, I have made some changes to the classroom and I thought it would be good to share some of these changes through a mini virtual tour.

The Interactive Word Wall

Students can get up close and personal with the new interactive word wall in our classroom. The reason I call it an interactive word wall is because students can actually walk right up to it and take a word to help them right from the wall. Then, when they are done with it, they can stick it right back onto the wall! This is a great practice in independence, responsibility, and makes for properly spelled words on their work. Students will also be encouraged to add their own words to the word wall to make it more enriching. Here is a picture of a small part of the word wall:

Math Wall

As we learn concepts in math, we learn new terms and symbols that will help us to show our knowledge. I now have all of these terms and symbols on our new Math Wall. Students can always look to the math wall if they need help with words and symbols. The math wall is also a place where work is posted after three part math lessons have been completed. Students can look at the math wall to get a better understanding of some of the different strategies their classmates have used to solve the same problems. Here is a picture of the math words and symbols component of our math wall:

Stayed tuned for another update on the Wonder Wall that is currently in the works!

Three Part Math Lessons

Students in room 214 have been working very hard their foundational math skills these last few weeks. They have been introduced to word problems, many of which have come in home for grade 2's in their math take home books. These word problems challenge students to think about how to apply strategies they are comfortable with to real life problems. Many of these explorations have also taken place through guided three part math lessons.

For more in depth information on three part math lesson, please CLICK HERE

Three part lessons involve three different steps. Firstly, the 'getting started' portion involves a minds on approach, helping students to get focussed and start thinking in the frame of mind required to help them solve problems. The 'working on it' phase is where the real cognitive work comes into play. Students are challenged with the problem, and spend time working on it independently or collaboratively with a partner. Grade 1's are often teamed up with Grade 2's during this phase. Pictures, words, and number are always encouraged with a focus on putting their thinking onto paper. The last part is the 'consolidation' phase that involves discussions, new learning, and introductions to questions that need still need answering. This is also the point when students are asked to talk about their strategies and learn from each other which ones might be the most efficient.

Mr. Hochberg helping students with addition concepts

Mr. Hochberg, our Principal at 20th, has taken time out of his day a few times to co-teach some of these three part lessons with me. Students are always excited to have Mr. Hochberg in the room and his encouragement has really helped many students.

Thanks Mr. Hochberg

NEW Language Resources!

I have just posted a number of great phonics and language online activities and games on the 'Important Resources' page.

Please go and check them out with your child and let me know if you have any questions. These games and activities are meant to help build some of the most important foundational skills students need to become better, more efficient readers. Some are better suited to readers just beginning to gain independence, some are good for readers who struggle with specific aspects of language, and some are just fun and help to cement prior knowledge.

Have fun playing these games with your child!

Science and Technology Update for Grade 2

From the pen of Mdme. Brusse:

 

In Science and Technology, Grade 2's are currently concluding the strand: UNDERSTANDING MATTER AND ENERGY: Properties of Liquids and Solids.

We have covered in great detail the topic of personal safety and the safety of others through studying safety labels and behaviours which ensure safety while working on experiments. Furthermore, we have examined states of matter: solids, liquids and gases, and performed a number of experiments to investigate the concepts of mixing, dissolving, absorbing, melting, separating and other interactions liquids and solids.

Our final part will be to examine floating and sinking through an in-class project.

 

Our assessment was through oral questioning, multiple choice testing and designing. Students work will be sent home for review at the end of the unit.

 

November Newsletter

Hello Everyone

Here is the November Newsletter. I apologize for its tardiness.

Learning Place Value through Base Ten Blocks

Students have been learning a lot about place value through their practice using math manipulatives. 'Manipulative' is just a fancy word for a tool to help a student learn experientially about concepts that are often abstract. In our classroom, we've been learning a lot about addition and the values of tens and ones. Base ten blocks have helped us explore these concepts in tactile ways. This is something that is both challenging and fun. Students have been making numbers in different ways and noticing patterns and groupings that will help to solidify or cement their knowledge of math concepts.

Here are some really creative examples of different ways students have explored making 25:

25 using 1's blocks

25 using a 10's rod and three groups of five 1's

25 using five groups of 1's

25 using groups of two 1's with one block left over

These are important building blocks for looking at grouping numbers and learning to do mental math using friendly numbers such as 1, 2, 5, 10, and 25. Please challenge your child to do simple addition at the grocery store, dinner table, and with the fingers on their own hands! I have also included a link on the 'Important Resources' page to an online tool for exploring base ten blocks.

The Music Man Comes to Visit!

Last week, students in our class were treated to a very memorable experience. Tinh's father Scott, also know as the Music Man in our class, shared with students his passion for music, creativity and fun. He explained to students that music is about rhythm, and rhythm is about patterns. We have been learning a great deal about patterns in math, but it's always helpful to see how patterns are everywhere. We even spent some time writing new verses to the popular standard, 'Down By the Bay', in which students were challenged to find patterns in language through rhyming words, also called phonograms.

Scott teaching students about the importance of patterns in music

Students just had to dance when the Music Man pulled out his electric guitar!

We have continued with this work and will be exploring rhyming through poems for the next couple of weeks. Students will learn about some common word families and will start creating their own dictionaries of words they are learning. It is time to expand our vocabulary and our minds!

Please take the time to encourage your child to find rhyming words at the dinner table, before going to sleep, or on your way to school. These practices help growing minds to put letters together into recognizable chunks, something research has shown to help new readers progress more quickly.

The Halloween Parade!

Twentieth Street's Halloween celebrations will take place in the morning on Friday, October 31st. To assist in making our Halloween celebrations successful, please have your child come to school in their Halloween costume. After announcements and attendance, children will participate in a Halloween parade at 9:30AM. This will be a community walk north on 20th St. and south on 21^st St.. Upon their return to school, students will go back to their classrooms.

Please ensure that your child is wearing a Halloween costume that is appropriate for school. They should not wear high heels, masks that cover their mouth or eyes, and no weapons of any sort should be brought to school. 

If you are sending in treats for the classroom, please ensure they are of the healthy variety. 

All parents are welcome to attend the parade and be a part of the Halloween Celebration.

Thanks!

'Take Home Books' begins this week!

Starting today (Monday), students in room 214 will begin the 'Take Home Books' program. Students were assessed early in the year to determine their accurate reading levels and have been practicing their voracious reading ever since. Initially, students were given full autonomy to choose their own books to read using the comprehension strategies of:

• Read the words
• Read the pictures
• Retell the story. 

Students will now be asked to take these strategies home with them. Students will sign out black and white levelled books on Mondays and will return them on Fridays.

Once we have a routine set up, after a month, students will be asked to write book reports on the books they are reading. This means they will be required to have read the book at home first, as very little time will be provided for reading these books at school. Please sit down with your child once a night to read the stories they bring home (repeatedly reading them is good, not bad!) and take the time to ask them questions according to our 'CAFE' menu. We will be using these take home books to build a comprehensive literacy program that includes the 'CAFE' menu of:

• Comprehension (understanding what is being read)
• Accuracy (reading the words and decoding the text)
• Fluency (reading with expression, getting into character)
• Expanding vocabulary (increasing the number of interesting words we know)

Our Trip to High Park!

Last week, students from room 214 took to the trails in Toronto's biggest city park to explore, play, and also to learn about how animals and plants prepare themselves for the winter season. Students forgot very quickly that the weather was a little rainy, instead spending their time looking for acorns, 'toppings' for their nature pizzas and anything else they could find. I soon found myself referring to students as squirrels and chipmunks because of the amazing things they discovered at every turn of the trail. We even had time to take a walk through the High Park Zoo!

Thanks so much to the High Park Nature Centre for hosting us, and to the Halsall Family Foundation for sponsoring our amazing field trip experience!

Some of the awesome nature we found (according to students):

Snake pit in the bowling field

The corn snake (Snappy)

Chipmunks

Squirrels

Acorns

White fungus

Bob the frog

Squirrel Dreys (nests)

Snails

Slugs

A fox (maybe)

The zoo

Larva inside an acorn

Some photos from the trip:

Making pizzas for squirrels

On the tire swing in the castle playground

Lamas in the High Park Zoo!

On the tranquil trails in the woodland

Room 214's October Newsletter

Grade 1 Science Unit - Animals!

A message to parents and guardians of grade 1 students:

Animal Groups: Birds, Reptiles, Amphibians, Mammals, Fish, Insects

Grade 1's have just begun a unit on animals for which they will be asked to complete an individual project and presentation that will require some work and research outside of the classroom. For this project, students will be asked to research two animals, each from different animal groups, and find out as much as they can about their chosen animals' needs. They will then combine these animals to create their own unique 'Scranimal' that will be presented to the class in the last week of October.

            For this unit, I would love if students could bring in any resources they have about animals (books, artefacts, magazines, pictures etc…) to be put on our Animal Resource Table. This will be a place that students can go to for ideas and inspiration. I also want students to try using at least two resources for their project and to not limit those resources to books. They may observe animals in the neighbourhood, use the internet, watch a film or visit a pet store. Library books from your local library may also be very helpful. I will also provide some from our own school library.

The culminating task will also include an art piece of their Scranimal inspired by the prolific author and artist, Eric Carle. I think this will be a very engaging project but it will be better if students are also talking about animals and different animal life cycles at home. Please encourage your child to discuss what they are learning about animals so that the learning is cemented.

Events This Week

Well the fall season is now in full swing and students in room 214 are getting really focussed on building reading stamina (which is now at a whopping 12 minutes!). We have also begun practicing our printing skills each and every school day so that we can becoming better writers and readers this year.

Last week, we had our monthly character education assembly and the character education focus for this month is RESPONSIBILITY. We always try to talk about what responsibility means in our classroom and across the school, but it always helps if it also becomes a word used at home. Please talk to your child about what responsibility looks like and how we need to be responsible for ourselves, and each other. It is when students see the connection between what we talk about at school and what becomes dinner conversation at home that the best learning connections are made for developing brains.

This week, Officer Rich will be back to visit with all Grade 1 students to talk about how to have fun and be safe in your community. We always look forward to Officer Rich dropping by because he always has some great stories to tell, and some great advice to give.

We also have Photo Day! happening on Thursday, October 9th. That's this Thursday! Please try to make sure your child can attend school that day and is dressed appropriately for photos.

Sarah the Book Fairy Comes to Visit

This week, students in Room 214 were visited by Book Fairy (and Room 214 parent), Sarah, who made a special donation of eight books for us to add to our classroom library. She spent time telling us about each book she brought and during free time later that day, students were already digging in to some of the new titles. We owe a big thank you our Book Fairy and hope that she might come to visit another day if we all keep working hard on building our reading stamina!

The Book Fairy introducing a 'Picachu' book!

Terry Fox Run a Great Success!

Twentieth Street School held their annual Terry Fox Run this past Wednesday and the event was a huge success. We are still tabulating the results of our 'Toonie for Terry' drive, but Room 214 raised $43 alone towards our school target of $300. Thanks to you and your contributions, the Terry Fox Foundation can continue to fund research for treatments to cancers that affect children and adults around the world.

As a part of our social studies curriculum, our class also spent time talking about what it really means to be a hero like Terry Fox was. We decided together that a hero:

• Helps others, even if they don't know the person they are helping
• Works hard every day to achieve their goals
• Always tries their best
• Works as a team with others

Students from Room 214 warming up their bodies for the big run!

We have also decided that our classroom is full of heroes that can do these things every day! We are so excited about this that we decided to make a book filled with the reasons we were running on the day of the big run. Stay tuned for Room 214's first published Book of Heroes!

Fun with Patterns in Room 214!

Our first mathematics unit has been so much fun so far. We have been talking about, learning about, and making our own patterns. It started with our names, where we created patterns using the letters of our names repeated in a 4 X 8 grid. We coloured in the same letters with the same colours and created works of art!

The grade 1s have been looking at patterns in nature and the grade 2s have been making patterns using connecting blocks and polygons based on shape, colour and more! Soon, grade 2s will be looking at growing and shrinking patterns using numbers, and grade 1s will be challenged to think about 2 and 3 attribute patterns.

What you can do...

Please talk about patterns with your child, and help your child to notice and point out patterns when you or he/she sees them. How are they incorporated into everyday life, art, math, nature and so on? These are enriching discussions to have with your child and it will help him/her to understand the value in learning patterns (even our ABC's and 123's are patterns!).

Have your child play the following math game to have fun learning about patterns:

Flower Frenzy (available through the Virtual Library as well)

Also, here are some other ideas for you to try with your child:

• Here's a great musical patterning idea for you! You can play this little game with as many kids as you'd like. Stand in a circle, and choose someone to go first. Ask each child to put together a three-step musical pattern (such as clap, snap, clap). Once the child has shown the rest of the group his/her pattern, everyone does the same. Continue with all the kids until everyone has had an opportunity to make his/her own musical pattern, and then try to put them all together!
• Art and patterning go hand in hand. Find yourself enough large-squared graph paper for you and your kids. Make sure you have lots of crayons or markers near by. Silently, each person decides on a specific pattern (not too long) and colours it on the graph paper (such as blue, red, yellow, yellow, red, blue). Once everyone has made their initial pattern, trade papers to the right, and the next person has to follow the same pattern. Continue along until the entire page has been filled.
• Patterning in everyday life! You can do this activity while you're driving in the car or walking through the neighbourhood! You will need a pencil, pencil crayons, and something to write on like a notebook (blank or lined, it doesn't really matter). On your trip or walk, have your kids record everything they see with a pattern! For example, if you see a building with lots of windows, your child would write the word "building with windows" and then would draw the pattern next to it (e.g., four windows followed by a beam, then four windows then another beam). Share your findings.

Terry Fox Run 2014!

Terry Fox is a true Canadian hero. He put his life on the line to help raise awareness and funds to support cancer research. Terry Fox reminds us each year that living for and giving to others is as important as living for ourselves. Please help us pay homage to this inspiring Canadian icon by encouraging your child to do something nice for someone else, and challenging yourself to do the same!

We will be running in the afternoon on Wednesday, September 24th and are hoping to raise $300. Please help us accomplish this goal by having your child donate a 'Toonie for Terry' this school week. Every little bit helps.

We will be learning a bit more about the hero named Terry Fox this week in Room 214, and hopefully getting in touch with the hero inside each one of us. Please ask your child who Terry Fox is so they have a chance to share what they've learned.

For more information, please visit the Terry Fox Foundation

Curriculum Night!

This Wednesday (September 17th), Twentieth St is excited to host this year's Curriculum Night and BBQ.

Forms have been sent home already in regards to hot dog or hamburger orders. If you still need a form, please write a note in your child's agenda and I'll make sure they get one to bring home. It may not be possible to buy on the day of so please order in advance.

Curriculum Night is a chance for you and your child to visit the school together and get a sense of what your child does all day (not to mention his or her teacher!). Some of the work students have been completing will be showcased; parents and guardians who would like to meet Snake may do so (don't be scared!), and I will be there to answer questions and discuss your child's progress so far. I can also show you some of the great resources offered through the class blog if you haven't had a chance to explore yet.

If you have any questions, please email me or call the school and I will return your call as soon as possible.

September Newsletter

Below you will find our September Newsletter that was also included in your child's agenda on Monday. My goal is to go paperless in 2 months and then all newsletters will be available on the blog. If you require a hardcopy, please speak to me to let me know!

Enjoy!

Welcome to our classroom blog!

A message to parents/guardians,

Welcome to the new blog for Room 214 (grades 1 and 2)! Please take a moment to explore the blog remembering that it is still very much a work in progress... This is an initiative to keep parents and students connected to what is going on in our classroom, and at Twentieth Street. Please add to your 'favourites' by bookmarking this blog as students are expected to check this blog at least once a week with someone at home to review concepts and ideas discussed in class. It will also be a place to check up on events so you can keep up to date on the goings on in our room and at our school. If you have any questions about the blog, or your child's learning, please feel free to contact me at the email address below, or arrange an informal meeting with me before or after school. My door is always open. I also encourage you to use your child's agenda as another communication tool. Students are expected to take agendas home with them each day, and bring them back the next. Please encourage your child to familiarize themselves with the calendar, use the agenda, and have fun with the many activities it contains.

Sincerely,

Mr. Smith

Zak.Smith@tdsb.on.ca