Kindness, Digital Citizenship, Comics and more!

**********REMINDER NO SCHOOL THURSDAY FEB 15th or FRIDAY FEBRUARY 16th DUE TO TEACER"S CONVENTION. NO SCHOOL MONDAY FEBRUARY 19th DUE TO FAMILY DAY. Have a great extra extra long weekend! See you back at school on:

Tuesday February 20th, 2018


Throw Kindness Around Like Confetti

In anticipation of Pink Shirt Day students have been talking about Kindness and how they can spread kindness through the school, Royal Oak and the World! We have been talking about the origins of Pink Shirt Day and how important, strong kind it was for others to STAND up to bullying.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gjmf3I1_ZhU

We also talked about a different type of bullying: Cyberbullying and how it is important to be Responsible Digital Citizens as we start using more and more technology. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o8Q9wB0XmYw

Ask me how I can spread KINDNESS at Royal Oak School.

This is a concept that we will continue talking about for the upcoming weeks. 

February 28th we will celebrate Pink Shirt Day by having an assembly, guest speakers like Constable Johnson and some Grade 9 students from Pratt. After the assembly we will decorate Pink Shirts with messages of Kindness to decorate the gathering space. We will be reading books about anti-bullying and kindness. 

Yesterday we made Kindness is... stickies to add to the Royal Oak School Bulletin Board. When it is all filled up we will add a picture of it to our classroom Blog. Eventually it will include every student at Royal Oak Schools Kindness comments. 

Tomorrow we will have so much fun giving and receiving Valentines and in the spirit of Love and Caring we will continue talking about Kindness and celebrating different ways of showing Kindness. 

Comics

All this week we are learning how to make a comic strip. We are going to Mr. Sandberg's room to learn this skill, while Mrs. Lagrana is teacher GoogleSlides to Mrs. McDonald's class and Mrs. McDonald is teaching Opinion Writing/Persuasive Writing to Mr. Sandberg's Class. Ask me what I have been learning about comics and what my comic strip is going to be about? 

Literacy

Today we practiced the -ow and -ou sound. We looked at words that have this sound combination. We looked at a few spelling generalizations:

-ow  this sound usually comes in the middle or at the end of a word, for example:
how, cow, now, towel, town, brown, drown, down

-ou this sound usually comes in the beginning or the middle of a word, for example:
out, our, sour, mouse, house, pounce, bounce, mouth

We also looked at using Rhyme to help us spell new words. If we know m-ouse we know h-ouse, for example. 

New words will be coming home in your child's green home communication folder or attached to their Home Reading Parent Letter. Please practice and put into silly sentences and using rhyming to come up with new words that follow these patterns. 

We also talked about words that belong in JAIL because they do not follow these rules and we just have to remember them. Sight words like want, what, pretty, and are. 

READING STRATEGY:

We have been talking about making connections when we read. 
Good readers are making connections all of the time!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wpByvesEMU

Parent Pipeline for practice at Home:

MATH

In our T-Shirt Facties, during Math, in our Math Groups, we have been given a word problem Challenge:

We are using CUBES to help us circle, underline, box, evaluate and solve. There are many steps to this question. So far we have been figuring out the first part by:

-circling the important numbers in the question
-underlining the question in the word problem
-putting boxes around the KEY words to help us understand what we are attempting to solve
-evaluating and using pictures, tables, charts or some sort of tally mark to help us show what we know
-Solving and then checking our work

We will be working on this problem all week and some of next week too as we add other steps and challenges to it along the way! 

Ask we what strategy I used to Evaluate and Draw my solution. 

Ted Harrison Arctic Landscape Art

Over the last week we have read "Children of the Yukon" by Ted Harrison and looked at some of his amazing Arctic Landscape Art. He is a famous Canadian Artist who is inspired by the Yukon and his time there.  

yukonartscentre.com

Ted Harrison is one of Canada's most popular artists. His love of the land and people of the Yukon has brought him national acclaim. His distinctive style of painting is both colorful and sophisticated yet retains an innocent charm, and appeals to young and old alike.

We looked at many examples of his work and then spent time creating our own Arctic Landscape Pastel creation, inspired by Ted Harrison's works of art. Ask me what I I decided to focus on in my picture?