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!

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.

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!