Check out our Game Day pics!

We had a blast this afternoon playing our terrific board games!  
I will mark the games over the weekend and the boys and girls will bring their feedback home for your signature. 
Thanks to all the creative kids in Room 208 for an awesome Fun Friday! 

Bring yer toonie!

Today's Math Goals

We've spent the entire week focusing on solving problems with money and with each day the boys and girls have done better and better!  

Alliteration and a common spelling mistake

We had some fun in Morning Message today learning about alliteration. Alliteration is the repetition of sounds or letters at the beginning of a series of words. 

Here is the example I shared with the kids: 

Luca is a lucky lad. He loves lolly-pops, licorice and lettuce. He lives in Luckytown where he walks his dog, Lucy late at night. His lovely parents are Larry and Linda. 

To get the ol' engines fired up, I asked each pair of children to choose the name of a character to write a mini-paragraph using alliteration.  

We had soooo much fun with this! I can't wait until Fun Friday this week when the kids will draw the wacky alliteration characters they created!  

We also talked about the ending -tion. A common spelling mistake among primary students is to write: shun. We talked about how the word shun means to avoid or ignore.  We also talked about how writing "shun" when we mean "tion" can be a tell-tale sign that third-graders haven't proofread their work thoroughly. ;)

Understanding Children With Learning Disabilities

This is an older video, but it is still highly relevant and exceptionally informative for teachers and parents who care about and work with learning disabled children.It's eye-opening and can completely shift your thinking about how you interact with children who have difficulties learning. 

It's well worth the hour. 

EQAO Preparation Activities

The best way to prepare for EQAO is through loads and loads of practice. It's my opinion that by starting on the first day of school, students are exceptionally well prepared come May and the language of the booklets is fully ingrained in their schema.  We do a little more intense preparation beginning in week 25 but there is no "mad cramming" required since it's just not needed.  

Scroll about halfway down to the section called, "Student Assessment and Scoring Guides" and you'll find links to copies of booklets used in previous years. You can print these out and have your child practice their skills at home. These are the ones we use in class to help us to be so successful year after year.  



EQAO Prep

Monday Funnies (turn up the sound!)

Just the smile we all need on a Monday. Anyone that grew up in the 80s will have a heightened appreciation for this!

Homework this week

The boys and girls are going to bring home their board games tonight (Monday) and finish them up. We've worked on them for approximately four hours in class over three Fun Fridays. You'll see that the students have made very good use of their time and worked very hard to make sure the layout of the game makes sense.  
In order to get them finished up and ready to go for this Fun Friday, I'm sending them home tonight.  They are due back on Wednesday. There will not be a Practice Page on Tuesday night.  

Being Frank

We've been talking a lot about idioms lately and how they're almost like a secret code word because they mean one thing but the words themselves don't indicate this.

We had a very lively discussion today about honesty and the difference between being honest and *too* honest. We read Being Frank, a terrific book about a boy named Frank who learns that when he's too honest, he loses friends and hurts the feelings of others.  

We enjoyed this story very much because even though it fits nicely with our chat about idioms and it was indeed very funny, it had a bigger, more important message and that's this: it's okay to be honest but sometimes you need to add a little sugar. 

Wednesday Funnies

We are really, really enjoying reading Because of Mr. Terupt together at our Evening Meetings. In the mornings we talk about what happened in the book the day before and how we can't wait to get to Evening Meeting to continue reading. 

So today one little boy classmate comes up to me and says, "Mrs. M, can't we just have Evening Meeting in the morning?"  
I respond with, "Heavens no! I'd get fired for breaking the rules!" 

Boy classmate seems satisfied and walks away. Then stops, turns around and says "But...but...it's your rule!" 

There's no foolin' this bunch! 

:) 

New Photos!

We have new photos to share from Valentine's Week! 

Click here to check out our latest album! 

We're ready for our Valentines!

We made the all important Valentine Mailbox this afternoon. It's my Valentine gift to the boys and girls.

While we were working this afternoon, you could hear a pin drop. So much concentrating!  

No foolin'! There are silent study rooms in Libraries across Canada that were LOUDER than Room 208 was this afternoon! 

Our 100th Day Party Mix!

Well didn't we have a ball making our last snack today!? Thank you to all the boys and girls for bringing in their 100 goodies for our mix! What a great treat it was! 

Thank you also boys and girls, for setting me straight...I thought it was all for me. ;)  

Happy 100th Day!

We're having a terrific day today!  It's the 100th day of school! Doesn't that seem hard to believe?  100 days together!

The next two days will be a bit of a break from the routine. Today we're going to share our paragraphs about what we'd do with $100.00 to donate. We'll make our Valentine's Day mailboxes (an essential don'tcha know!), we'll enjoy our 100th day party mix that the kids helped make and even play a super fun Smartboard game about counting to 100. 

We read Oh The Thinks You Can Think by Dr. Seuss this morning and we talked about all the things we've learned in the last 100 days and thought about all the things we'll know come another 100 days.  

It's a great couple of days here in Room 208! Our Valentine's Day party is tomorrow and it's always lots of fun.  Come Tuesday, we'll get back on track with RRWEs, hooks, the Civil Rights movement, and all that good stuff.  

It's a great time of year to be a teacher too! You get to feel like a kid again with all this Valentine-y stuff.    

Today's Math Goals

We're moving along in Unit 6. Today we talked about temperature and we reviewed some of the benchmark temperatures one should know (e.g. water boils at 100 degrees Celsius).

We also talked about how a thermometer is used and that any temperature below zero will need a minus sign in front of it. 

We've been talking about temperature since the first day of school as part of Morning Message, so I'm sure this part of the unit felt very familiar to the boys and girls. 

Not my chart

This is not my chart, I found it on Pinterest, but boy is it ever useful! 
This is a great reference tool for parents to review with their children at home.  

Let's Celebrate!

To celebrate the 100th day of school, I'm asking each child to bring in 100 of some kind of small snack item. Each child was given a disposable glove today to count out their snack item.  
We'll mix it all together on Thursday and enjoy a tasty little afternoon snack!    

Then, on Friday, we'll really party-it-up at our Valentine's/Hundredth Day celebration! We'll play games, dance for 100 seconds, eat some treats, it'll be our greatest Fun Friday yet!

Tuesday's Practice Page

Instead of the usual Tuesday night Practice Page, students will be asked to completed a page from their "Hundredth Day of School" booklet. 
Tonight, they're asked to think about a charity they would donate $100.00 to if they were given the opportunity. 
More than enough lines have been provided and students are expected to fill *most* of them. I'd accept that three of four lines are left black.  
Please give the assignment a once-over and check for neatness and punctuation.  

Go Canada Go!

Look at this great bunch of Canadian kids! 

Working on our calendar folders!

Oh the weather outside is frightful!

Outside our window 11:40 am today! Yikes! 

Away Today?

Here is a video of what was taught in Social Studies today. If your child was absent, please have them watch the video and write their Learning Journal for homework tonight. 

The Learning Journal is due on Thursday. 

Tuesday/Wednesday's Math Goals

We're having lots of fun creating this unit and interactive calendar project.  It's taking a little longer than expected, but that's a-okay. It's the first time I've tried something like this, so there's been a few bumps along the road (mostly my fault!).  

I'm hoping we'll having it finished by the end of Wednesday's Math class.  

Serves me right!

It serves me right (or is it "write"???) for trying to tweak my Math lesson for today during last night's Superbowl!  Sigh.  Sadly, our lesson didn't go very well.  The worksheets I had decided to "tweak" were ruined by a handful of typos.  
Thankfully, this ol' gal has learned to always be prepared for disaster! 

So, we worked on something else this afternoon (our "Happy 100th Day of School" booklet.) It was still Math...just not thee Math I had planned. We'll try again tomorrow. 

I'm thinking it's probably not a good idea to fix those typos during Jeopardy is it?! 

Have a great week everyone! It's hard to believe we're at Week 21 already!   

Let's talk about adding a "plus"

When we answer a question about a story, experience we've had or favourite food, it's nice to add extra information that the reader might find helpful. Sometimes your plus will be facts you know about the topic from, say a tv show you saw or a book you read, other times, a plus might be an extra detail that makes your writing more interesting or entertaining. 

Here are two examples where students have answered the question and added their own plus.  

Question: 
How did daily practice help Wayne Gretzky become a better hockey player? 

Response: 
Daily practice helped Wayne Gretzky become a better hockey player. I know this because in the text it said that he was able to practice any time he wanted on his backyard rink that his father built. I am better at piano because I have a keyboard at home. If I only practiced at my lessons I would not have much opportunity to get better.  

Question: 
What does your family do on Christmas Eve?  

Response:  
Christmas Eve with my family is really fun. My grandparents come over and we open presents from them and then we eat all kinds of delicious foods. It gets really fun when my mom puts my whiny brother to bed and my Dad, Nonno and I play video games while my Mom and Nana clean the kitchen.  

So you can see that in both examples, the child answered the question but took it a step further by adding that extra information. With the Wayne Gretzky response, the child explained how he can relate to the need for daily practice. In the second response, the child added that funny detail about the whiny brother and the fun really getting started.

In a nutshell, a "plus" is any extra, relevant information that the reader might find useful.