Wednesday 8 January 2014

January

Happy New Year!

I hope you all had a relaxing and festive Christmas. We're back into the swing of things now- working hard and having fun. Report cards for term one are fast approaching. I will begin writing them this weekend as they will be sent home in a few short weeks. You will see letter grades beside each of the subjects and then specific comments about children's learning. If you ever have any questions or concerns about the content of the report card, please do feel free to write me a note in the agenda and we can set up a meeting to discuss it. Each and every child has made tremendous progress and should be proud of their accomplishments so far this year. Remember, each child learns at their own pace, in their own way. If you are seeing the growth, regardless of the report grades, that is certainly something to celebrate.

The Curriculum This Month.........

Language Program: We are working on a unit all about Media Literacy. In this day and age, the amount of information that is available to us is increasing at a rapid rate. We are surrounded with media everywhere we we look. Children are growing up with the internet and ever changing technology at their fingertips. So it's important that we spend a little bit of time creating awareness about the media messages we are exposed to everyday. We will be critically examining various forms of media and therefore better equipping the students make decisions about the true meaning of messages. Some examples of media around us are....
- billboards
-books
-cartoons
- movies
-commercials
- internet
-magazines
-paintings and photographs
-video games
- radio
- menus etc
The children will have an opportunity to examine commercials and ads that are targeted towards a specific audience like adults or children and then we will be looking at what the implied and hidden messages are. For example, why do kids Happy Meals look different than an adult meal? Why do they show older kids playing with younger children's toys? etc.... This unit is a great way for us to think critically about what we see in the media. We will be incorporating our reading, writing and oral communication into this unit but we will also continue with our traditional levelled guided reading groups and literacy centres.

Math: We didn't get time before the holidays to begin our unit on 3D geometry so we have started now. Please see December's post for more details about what children are learning. They are having a great time exploring the attributes of different 3D shapes through building and sorting activities. If you would like to support your child with the concepts from this unit, here are some ideas:
- play "I spy" in your home or on a walk if the weather ever gets warm enough to go outside. Look for shapes that are rectangular prisms, cylinders, sphere's, cubes etc.
- have a race to see who can locate and collect the most of one shape in your shape in your house ( ie. I found a board game, cereal box and tissue box and they are all rectangular prisms!)
- play a sorting game- collect objects that all have something in common ( ie. they all roll) place them in  one pile and then another pile with things that cannot roll. Have your child guess what the sorting rule is

Social Studies: We are creating a mini city of Brantford in our classroom as kind of a fun way to recount what we have learned during our community helpers unit.
Science: We will start a unit on Structures and Mechanisms. Children will discuss different materials used to make various structures in our homes, classroom and outside environment ( park equipment, cement, metal for our chairs etc) and learn why and how structures are created ( ie. a stop light is tall so that people can see it and made of metal so that it can withstand the weather etc). We will look at structures in nature and structures made by people. We will even explore various famous structures around the world.... Colloseum, Leaning Tower of Piza, CN Tower etc. Finally, at the end of our learning, students will demonstrate what they have learned by creating their own structure!