Division 10's News of the Week

Good Morning to all my families,
I hope everyone enjoyed the lovely, blue skies yesterday! The weather man says we may be in for a little bit of rain starting Monday, so get out there today and soak in the sun before we need to pull out our rain gear! Thank you for helping your child remember their indoor shoes during the snow season as it has kept our carpets a little bit cleaner and thus our bottoms a little bit dryer!

A busy week was had by all the children and a very productive one as well!
Every Monday the children are given a new set of spelling words. The grade ones are given four new words now a week they are to practice these words and then continue to review the other words that they have been given since September. By review I suggest that the children read the words and try to spell them out word and as they continue to do this on a daily basis, that is how it is committed to memory. The grade two's are getting very good at remembering and learning the strategies to commit their words to memory. During the spelling time, we look at word families, rule breakers in spelling and rule followers. They are doing very well as can be seen in their spelling tests. Keep up the hard work boys and girls!

Now that I am working full time on Tuesdays we have filled it with a lot of different activities for the children to get used to. First off we are joining Ms. Whitelaw and participating in a Poetry unit. We will be looking at a variety of poetry.This week Ms. Whitelaw introduced "clue" giving as a poetic style. Where one does not actually know what the poem is about until they have read all the clues. We were lucky to have Ms. Craig join us today. Ms.Craig will be volunteering on Tuesdays and will be helping children with their reading and writing and at this point will be helping Clement as she is fluent in French! Today we also had Mr.Toszak join our class in the afternoon. He will be with the children every Tuesday afternoon for an hour to teach them how to work on the school Ipads while I go to his class and teach art. It's a perfect trade. The children were delighted to be working with Mr. T and the ipads.

On Wednesday the children worked on learning how to procedural write. They wrote the steps of how to build a snowman. We will be working on this type of writing over the next month. Procedural writing is a very important style of writing as it helps children work on clearly communicating. They will work on giving clear directions for everyday activities and learn how to communicate without skipping steps.

On Thursday the children had the pleasure of Deanna visiting us again. She read us a story about Totem Poles and talked about what the symbolism of different animals on the totem pole and then we got to colour and create a piece of art with the totem pole.

On Friday during buddies, we talked to all of our Buddy classes about our Homeless/ Street People and their needs right now. Due to the cold that Vancouver is experiencing many shelters are filled to overflowing. We talked about the amount of street people who cannot get into some of the shelters and what could we do. I read the children a story called Lily and the Paper Man. It was a beautiful story about how even young children can give back to others. Thus prompted our idea of how we could help. We thought this might be a great time for us to do a Sock Drive for the adults on the street. So with our buddy classes we made posters to invite families to donate adult size socks which we will then take to a shelter (or???) to have the socks distributed to those in need. In true Bayview fashion we are hoping that we will be able to fill the big box outside of our room!

Finally:
Things to remember (and needs)
1) Skating forms and money need to be sent back as soon as possible so I can see how many drivers we have/need.
2) Early Dismissal this Wednesday and Thursday at 200 for the parent/teacher/student conferences
3) Needs: Swiffer dust picker upper...if you have one of these????? our room is very very dusty and that doesnt seem to be something that our janitorial crew does...guess, that's left to the teaching staff as well.

With that,
have a great Sunday and enjoy the pictures!
Teri

Working on our Matter experiment. Does some matter Dissolve in water or not? 

They love doing experiments in the sunshine!

What happens????

Aren't they adorable?

So many different expressions!

This is our platter, or the start of it. Once again, the fundraiser, gala is coming up and all classrooms are busy creating their platters!

Our Procedural writing...how to build a snowman!!


I did take waaaaaaaaaaaaay more pictures, but my camera is breaking down...boo hoo!! Some pictures didnt go onto my card??? why????