Friday, February 9th

 Hello Families!

Important Dates:

Thursday and Friday, Feb. 15-16 - No School - Teachers' Convention

Monday, Feb. 19 - No School - Family Day

Our learning:

Literacy:

• We have moved into more jobs during our Daily 5 literacy time.  Ask your child the different literacy centres they completed this week.  We have learned the routines this week and are moving towards building our stamina in the coming days. 
• This is the end of our 6 week literacy group cycle where we will look at everyone's skills and begin again in a couple of weeks. 
• In writing we practiced how to writing using the SAD formula to about making a snowman.  Ask your child what this means.  (Hint: sequence, action, detail) 
• We also listened to the story Stuck by Oliver Jeffers and worked on retelling the beginning, middle and end of the story.  Ask your child what the biggest part of a story is. 

Math:

• In grade 2, we are building our knowledge of the meaning of addition and subtraction.  We also reviewed the terms, equal, equation, adding and subtracting.  
• We completed word problems to make them addition or subtraction problems as well as created our own problems and equations based upon a picture prompt.
• We then practiced the counting on and counting back strategies to play addition/subtraction connect four. 
• In grade 1, we continue to build our addition and subtraction strategies.  
• This week we developed our ability to use addition to make 10.

Inquiry:

• This week we read many stories and non-fiction books about the Lunar New Year.  We also sang a song about the Monster Nian.  Which we learned means year - thank you Joecy!
• Ask your child about all the Lunar New Year traditions. 
• Today we excitedly cleaned the classroom top to bottom to get rid of all the bad luck for the new year. 
• In learning about the Arctic, we learned about Igloos and the term insulation.  Mr. Kelly was in our class today and taught us about an Inuksuk and lead us through an art lesson. See below for our beautiful drawings. 
• To continue our learning around Black History Month, we learned about the artist Alma Thomas. She was an artist and a teacher whose painting "Resurrection" was unveiled as part of the White House Collection in 2015 and is the first in this collection by an African-American woman. 
• We were inspired by her art to create our own using paint.  See below for a picture.