What is Inquiry?

Students in Room 214 have spent some time this year learning the value of asking questions. Inquiry is a model of learning that encourages natural questioning. When we ask questions about things that interest us, we are more engaged in our learning and in finding out the answers.

We completed a Mind Map that helps to understand what inquiry is all about. Here is a picture of what the students came up with.

For more information on the inquiry process, please click on this link

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!

Raz Kids = Reading Fun!

Last week, I sent home a parent letter with students about our new online reading program called Raz-Kids that I have subscribed Room 214 to. Each student in our class has a password (which is actually a picture) as well as the website address for Raz-Kids taped inside the front of their agenda.

The Raz Robot: Build and personalize a robot with all the reading points you earn!

This service will allow students to read books at their level (I've already set them up at their current reading level) on any device or computer that has a connection to the internet. They can log in from anywhere and choose from over 1000 books that will help them to become fluent masters of reading! There are also assignments that challenge students to use their comprehension and memory skills to answer questions about the books they read.

Personalize your Raz Rocket with more reading points!

All of their progress is tracked by me and as of next week, parents and guardians will be able to log in and track progress too. If you are having any trouble logging your child into Raz Kids, please let me know as soon as possible and I will provide you with 'tech support' and help you and your child to get it up and running.

Here are a quick set of instructions to get you going:

1) Go to Raz-Kids (http://www.raz-kids.com/main/Login)

2) Enter the teacher name: zaksmith

3) Find your child's name in the list and click the button above their name.

4) Click on the picture (or pictures) that is the password for your child (found on the slip of paper taped into your child's agenda).

5) Start reading!

Here is the link to the Raz-Kids App for Apple users.

Here is the link to the Raz-Kids App for Android users.

**Note: You do not need the app to use Raz-Kids but it does make it easier...

His Name is STANLEY!!!

This week, students in grades k-3 were audience to the Lakeshore Collegiate production of That Rabbit Belongs to Emily Brown. This wacky story about a girl who gives up the chance for all the toys in the world to hold onto her favourite stuffy and best friend Stanley the Rabbit teaches all of us that some things in our lives are just too important to give away. We also read the picture book and watched a short film version of the story to compare and contrast.

In the story, the Queen writes a thank you letter to Emily Brown, who helps the Queen find her own stuffy to have adventures with. Students wanted the chance to write their own letters, so they were asked to pretend they were asked to write a letter to a character in story. Here are few letters that were written by students in room 214.

Daphne's letter

Gordie's Letter

Tinh's Letter

If you would like to print your own letter writing templates at home to practice more letter writing, please click here.

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!!!

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.

 

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.

'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)