Arts Express Dance Program

For the last few years, students at Twentieth have had the opportunity to learn dance through a fantastic sponsored program that brings dance instructors into our school once a week for one month to teach them different dance forms. It has been a highlight of the week for many students in 214.

Here is a video of students from 214 (and some other students) getting down to some good old fashioned soul music. 

Don't you love them now that they can dance?

Our Community Market

For the last two weeks, students in 214 have been hard at work planning, designing, engineering (and sometimes redesigning) storefronts for our upcoming Community Market. In pairs, students will open a shop, sell products, give the right change, and go shopping!

Students were faced with the challenge to create an inviting storefront that encouraged them to think about branding and advertising, all while learning about how to use coin amounts up to $2.

Over the course of this integrated unit, students have become familiar with basic media literacy concepts, as well as regularly exploring the names and values of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, loonies, and toonies. We have spent time adding, subtracting, and comparing these values as well as combining coins to make larger amounts.

Please encourage your child to continue practicing with coin values at home. Here are some ways you can encourage your child to use coins and have fun with it:

• Ask your child to help you make the right change when shopping
• Perform pretend 'transactions' at home for things in the cupboard
• Add up the cost of certain groceries on the receipt (like all the fruit or all the veggies)
• Think of all the combinations of coins that could be used to make your age (eg. if you are 42 years old, how many different combinations of coins could be used to make 42 cents?)

Our Community Market will be taking place this Wednesday afternoon and students from other classrooms will be visiting to go shopping!

SNAP Program a great success!

Grade 2 students in Room 214 have had the privilege of taking part in a school sponsored self regulation development program over the last two months called SNAP. Here is some specific information about this fantastic program that is run by Toronto's very own Child Development Institute. 

Room 214 would like to give a HUGE thanks to Faisa Mohamud of the Child Development Institute for leading such a fantastic program and dedicating her time (and patience) to our students here at Twentieth Street. THANK YOU!

SNAP®, which stands for Stop Now And Plan, is an evidence-based cognitive behavioural model that provides a framework for teaching children struggling with behaviour issues, and their parents, effective emotional regulation, self-control and problem-solving skills. The primary goal of SNAP® is to keep children and youth in school and out of trouble. SNAP® has demonstrated positive treatment outcomes among children under the age of 12 with conduct and related behavioural problems and their families.

Faisa talking to 20th St. students about the 'wheel of self control'

Studies have shown the following benefits in children and families who have taken part:

• Increased emotion-regulation and self-control skills in children and their parents
• Reduced aggression, bullying and antisocial behaviour
• Increased social competency
• Improved academic success by decreasing behavioural issues at school

Sorting Woozles!!!

Since returning from the winter holidays, students in Room 214 have already been hard at work continuing with their learning of how to sort and categorize objects using various attributes. Our classroom was also very lucky this week to have Mrs. Christine Rowe-Quinn, our Family of Schools Math Coach, come for a visit to see us in action.

Students began this work before the holiday, but we revisited and reinforced these concepts this week using 'Woozles' (pictured below). These funny germ-like creatures have various attributes such as dots, colours (they were coloured red and blue), fuzziness and shape that can help us to sort them into various categories.

Please click here. to print a set at home to try with your child. Print two copies and use a different colour to colour each set (one set of eight will be one colour, the other set of eight a different colour). Then cut them out and sort away!

Woozle Cards (uncoloured)

We asked students to work in teams to create categories using the attributes listed above, then place their woozles into string loops depending on their sorting rules. Some students even decided to create their own Venn Diagrams, creating a middle category for commonalities between already sorted woozles. Wow!

Students sorting using 2 attributes!

Mrs. Christine Rowe-Quinn discussing patterning with students

We owe a big thank you to Christine for coming into our classroom and helping us all to become better mathematicians! THANK YOU!!!

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.

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!