Dear Students and Families,
I hope that as you read this post you are all safe at home and feeling healthy. Not returning to school after the March Break is a new experience that we are all navigating together (but apart) for the first time. If you need anything over the next couple of weeks, please email me at faye.bourassa@ocsb.ca.
As we wait to see how things progress, I will provide you with some ideas of curriculum based tasks to keep your children busy and learning, without being too much for them or you to work through. I know many parents must be very overwhelmed trying to work from home, and care for their children who must also remain at home. Feel free to use what is useful and just remember that your safety and well being is more important than the curriculum right now.
Language
The five new word wall words this week are:
mine, ride, five, nice, might
Please practice both reading and writing these words. You can use pencil/pen and paper, white boards, sidewalk chalk or whatever materials you have to write with at home. I even saw a fun activity where you put shaving cream on a cookie sheet, and then have your child print them with his/her hands in the shaving cream, and wipe it out when finished.
The word family of the week is the “ight” word family. Practice adding different letters to the front of the word family to make new words (light, fight, night, right etc).
Here is a short video link to help reinforce this concept:
Students should be reading to you and with you every day, when possible. If you don’t have books at home, remember you can log into their raz kids account. You can use the app or go to www.kidsa-z.com. The username is fbourassa2 and your child knows his/her password. Email with any difficulties.
Writing:
We just wrote our first complete paragraph before the break. We wrote using guided writing. First, I modelled writing 3 complete sentences about a topic for the body of the paragraph. The sentences should start with a capital, have finger spaces, make sense, and end with a period. For example, students can write sentences about what they are doing each day at home. The content of what they write is not as important as the daily practice itself. Then, with the students, I brainstormed sentences that would introduce the topic of the paragraph. For example, if your child was writing about her day, she could write "Let me tell you about my day." or "Today was a lot of fun." or "I had a busy day." We added a topic sentence to the beginning of our writing. Finally, we practiced adding a concluding sentence. For now, I had them add a final sentence telling what they thought or felt about the topic. We came up with sentences similar to "I think today was a great day." or " I really loved my day." Students added this concluding sentence at the bottom of the paragraph. Then, they added an appropriate title to their writing. This is a lot of work and could be done over several days. Students could write about their pets, their families, a game they played etc. For many students, it may be easiest to write the 3 sentences of the body first. Then, add an intro. sentence and a concluding sentence.
In addition, before the March Break we had may groups of students working together as authors and illustrators during Quiet Time and Free Time. Several students had already completed books and shared them with the class. Encourage your child to write/illustrate as many stories as he/she can imagine. If you have materials to staple/bind the stories that's great. If not, just bundle the pages and we can bind them when we return to school. It will be lots of fun to share our stories with the class and add them to the class library.
Math:
We were just about to finish our graphing unit. The students really enjoyed creating survey questions, recording answers in tally charts and making pictographs and bar graphs that showed the data. Encourage your child to make surveys and record the information in tally charts and graphs. They could record types of stuffies, colours of socks, types of canned soup etc. Next, we will be starting fresh with a telling time unit. The focus for this week should be to help your child learn to tell time on an analog and digital clock, to the hour. Emphasize the long and short hands and what each represents. Analog clocks can be tricky! The long hand shows the minutes and the short hand shows the hours. Each big number on the clock represents a 5 minute interval but the hour is based on 60 minutes. You can also add a focus of benchmark times in their lives, for example what time they usually wake up, have breakfast, have lunch, dinner and bedtime and whether they happen in the am or the pm. This should be a good focus for the week.
TVO Kids has a game to reinforce telling time to the hour and half hour.
Math Flips is a website that has content that I would normally include in our daily Number Talk. You can print out pdfs or access it through Google Slides. The content of these math flips is a great way to build number sense with your child and encourage him/her to explain the reasoning used to determine the answer. You can access the website through this link:
https://mathvisuals.wordpress.com/math-flips/
Below is a list of "Online Learning Resources" and fun activities to do from home.
Stay safe, stay healthy and don't hesitate to contact me by email if you have any questions, concerns etc.
Faye Bourassa
Ministry of Education E-Portal:
Language:
Math:
Religion:
General Learning:
Other Fun Activities:
Daily doodling with Mo Willems (A favourite author of Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus and Piggy and Elephant books)
National Parks Virtual Tours:
Virtual Museum Tours:
Ranger Rick:
Virtual Field Trips all around the World!
Daily Physical Activity:
Go Noodle:
Luv2Groove (will be streaming live dance videos throughout the week, I believe!):
Check out this link for so many more online resources:
