We Are Fortunate!

The winter season is a perfect time to reflect on how fortunate we are and how lucky we are to live in a free and peaceful country where people help each other. This holiday season we are showing our kindness, generosity, and thankfulness in three ways.
We are fortunate to have Sgt. Liberty Kitchen, an air cadet and daughter of our amazing Educational Assistant Ms. Kitchen, involve us in her fantastic Christmas card program for the second year. Each student at Hugh Beaton is writing to a soldier stationed in Kabul, Afghanistan this Christmas. We are extremely lucky to have these brave people protecting our freedom each day. We hope our card and pictures brightens their day and makes being away from home during the holidays a bit easier.
We are also bringing in canned food to donate to needy families. To date, we have brought in 56 cans, but we have a goal of 100 cans. We will continue to think of others as we are grocery shopping with our families.
Our school is also donating Christmas gifts to 20 children through the Children's Aid Society and to children living at our local Women's shelter, Hiatus House. Our class is responsible for donating toys, books and clothes to two baby boys with ages ranging from newborn to age two. We enjoyed brainstorming items that a baby boy would love to see under his tree Christmas morning!
We hope that these simple acts will help someone else have a happy holiday. We are very fortunate to be able to "pay it forward". That is what kind people do.

A Busy Time

The end of October and early November is a busy time in Grade One. We are finishing our DRA testing to better determine your child's reading level, we are testing your child's sight word recognition and diving headlong into progress reports and the writing workshop.
I love this time of year as it means progress reports and Parent-Teacher Interviews. It gives me a chance to talk to parents about their child's progress and to learn more about your child as a person, not only as a student. Thank you to all the parents who took the time to speak to me either before the Parent-Teacher night, or on that night, as good communication is an on-going process, not just two evenings a year. If you were unable to come in for an interview, please book one with me after school at your convenience. Just send a note in your child's agenda and we can figure out a good time for each of us. Thank you for being a partner in your child's learning!
Mrs. Jinks

Take- Home Reading Opportunities

Today our class began Raz-kids.com. Raz-kids is a terrific online reading program that allows your child to read "just right" books at their independent reading level. The program allows your child to listen to the book, to read and to record their reading for teacher review, and to take a brief comprehension quiz. I have placed each child in a level from A to E based on their Fall Reading Assessment results. Please let me know if your child is struggling in any way. If your child feels the books are too easy, encourage them to continue on, but they may access harder books through the bookroom option. The children last year loved to read on Raz-kids, especially since they earned star points to buy items in the Raz rocket store. The best part about this program is that you can access books at anytime in the day, at anyplace in the world through your laptop and you don't have to worry about lost or late books! For those that prefer the traditional Take-Home Reading Program, look for a post this week outlining what you can do to support your child at home.

To log on, go to raz-kids.com and type in 1jhughbeaton and press enter. There is no password needed, simply click on your child's name and you are ready! Enjoy!

Sight Word Day

Yesterday we had fun with sight words.  Each week we get a list of 5 words that we need to learn to be good readers and writers.  Usually Mrs. Jinks gets the words from our weekly shared reading poem or from words we use a lot in our writing, or from the Dolch high frequency word list.  We now have 30 words on our word wall, and we are practicing them each week at home and at school.  Today we changed our names and became a sight word for the day.  We all got a name tag with a sight word we have studied on it and we called each other by those new names only. Mrs. Jinks was Mrs. With, and Mr. Konrad, our Vice Principal was Mr. At.  It was a lot of fun and we were able to have lots of mini lessons on words.  We found words that were part of the same family, (e.g., me and see, by and my) and talked about how words may be spelled similarly, but sound differently(e.g., to and go).  We talked about words that have a magic e (e.g., like) and those that don't follow the regular rules and you just have to remember their spelling(e.g., you).  We learned a lot and had fun doing it!  We graphed whether people enjoyed having a new name at the end of the day and most people enjoyed the experience.  Those that didn't like it said they liked their name better, or didn't like the feel of the name tag on their clothes.  A wonderful way to review!

Our Pumpkin Glyphs

We did pumpkin art and graphed the results. We are getting better at comparing our results and adding a "So what" sentence to show that our questions can be useful in planning our next steps! We enjoyed creating them!

Anti-Bullying Month

October is Anti-Bullying month.  We have spent a great deal of our time in September and October discussing what appropriate behaviour is at school, and what to do if someone bullies you.  We started the discussion by reading the story "One" by Kathryn Otoshi.  It is a wonderful book that talks about the importance of standing up to bullies, and that together we can all "count".  We created a chart promise to stand up for ourselves and for others, to not bully(only put ups, not put-downs), and to treat others the way we want to be treated.  We will say "No! I don't like it" to someone who tries to bully us first, and then if we have difficulty solving the problem ourselves, we will ask for help from an adult.

We also read "How Full Is My Bucket"  and discussed how we all have imaginary buckets that empty or fill depending on our interactions with others and our feelings.  We need to do kind things for others to make ourselves feel wonderful.  We wrote about ways to fill the "buckets" of others and therefore, our own.  1J students are bucketfillers!

The Pumpkin Patch

We had a wonderful experience at Pepe's Pumpkin Patch!  We give 19 thumbs up for this fieldtrip!
 We had studied the needs of living things and the lifecycles of apples and pumpkins at this school, but this trip really helped us to relate our learning to real-life.  Thank you so much to the staff at Pepe's for an interesting, informative, and action-packed fieldtrip.  We especially liked the witch who guided our corn maze/corn information session.  We have all had the wonderful Essex County sweet corn that is grown here, but what we didn't realize how many things are made from field corn!  We knew that cereal and other foods are made from corn, but car tires?  That is what I love about fieldtrips, all the incidental learning that occurs! 

We had our faces painted with pumpkins, spiders, ghosts, cats and tigers, oh my!  We went on a hay ride and learned more from Pepe about the pumpkin plants, and saw the vines and a few pumpkins and flowers up close.  We played a "hot potato" pumpkin-themed game where the winners received an apple to eat- and boy were we hungry from all that learning!  We had D.P.A. (Daily Physical Activity) to one of our favourite songs, the chicken dance.  We picked a pie pumpkin to take home as well.  We are thankful to all the parents who chaperoned and to Mrs. MacLeod who organized the fieldtrip.  We can't wait to see what we learn on our next fieldtrip!

Learning Through Sharing: A Quadblogging Journey

Our class is very lucky to have started quad blogging with three other classrooms in Canada and the United States. We each take a turn commenting on each other's blogs and learning about what excites and interests us about learning. We are very fortunate to have Mrs. Horst in Burlington, Ontario, Mrs. Sather from Montana, U.S.A. and Mrs. Simmons in Columbus, Ohio participating with us. We have already visited two of their classrooms as a class, and we have already learned so much!

We learned that despite how far away our classrooms may be, there are many things that we have in common! We are all "kind kids" and learning "experts" like Mrs. Sather's class, and "artists" and "heroes" like Mrs. Horst's class. We can't wait to visit Mrs. Simmon's class at the end of the month and to see what connections we can find with them as well.

This is a journey that will help us to become better readers, writers and communicators. This opportunity allows us to open our doors to become more comfortable learning from others from afar. We are widening our circle of friends and we all know that some of our best learning comes from our experiences with friends! 

Please read Mrs. Horst`s thought-provoking blog about the importance of learning through technology.

Visit the wonderful blogs of our new friends:
Mrs. Horst's Grade 1/2
http://www.chatt.hdsb.ca/~horstm
Mrs. Sather's Grade 1
http://room6kindkids.blogspot.ca
Mrs. Simmon's Grade 1
http://www.1dkids.blogspot.ca

Thanksgiving and Sharing

Thanksgiving is celebrated in Canada each year on the second Monday in October.  It coincides with the harvesting of crops.  We take time with friends and family to reflect on our lives and we give thanks for loved ones and all we have.  Thanksgiving is a perfect time to discuss sharing as well.  We are very proud of our work!  We shared apples and learned about their lifecycle.  We will also be learning about pumpkin lifecycles and we will visit a pumpkin patch on Friday!

http://smilebox.com/playBlog/4d7a4d314d4459344e44513d0d0a&blogview=true

Our Alphabet Book

We have been reviewing alphabet letters, sounds, and words that begin each letter.  We are becoming experts! Good writers write about what they know.  We searched our houses and brought in two objects which begin our assigned letter.  We recorded our voices on our Book Creator app, but the audio seems not to be working.  Please enjoy anyways!

https://docs.google.com/open?id=0BzgASXsWaezrdFo0OEoyMEZDWms

We Know A Lot About Numbers!

Today we brainstormed everything we know about numbers. We worked in our small groups to present out thinking about the numbers 3, 6, 7, 5 and 8. I overheard great conversations. "If I have six circles and I cross one out, I have five." "An octopus has eight legs." "I can write my name three times." and "I read the story of the three bears."
What we know about numbers comes from our experience with the world. We hope to expand on what we know this month!

Our Morning Alphabet Review

We start our day with a few minutes of alphabet sounds while we finish up our agenda message. We love to use the smart board!

Terry Fox Walk

Today we had our Terry Fox walk. I was so pleased to see the excitement and concern for others shown by our students. Chants of "Go, Terry, go!" were heard all around the Hugh Beaton community today. We raised a lot of money with our "Toonies for Terry" and the children were inspired by Terry Fox's message of hope and determination. He taught us that we need to dream big and to believe in ourselves to make the world a better place. Terry left us 31 years ago, but his spirit lives on in our children.

Dot Day

On Friday we read the book, "The Dot" by Peter H. Reynolds. The story is a wonderful reminder that everyone can be an artist, that all artists begin with a single dot. Unfortunately, some students come to school with the attitude that they "can't" do art, or that what they make isn't "good enough". "The Dot" is the story of Vashti, who turns from a shy child who refuses to "make her mark", to a brave artist who fills her world with colour and hope, an inspiration to others.Here are our Artist's Work:

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Learning with our Math Kit

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Spelling City

Check out Spelling City to practice your sight words. We have a free version to use. Just go on spelling spellingcity.com/1jhughbeaton
To access cool games. Look for the lists that begin with 2012, for example 2012-sept4-20. Happy practicing!

Graphing our glyphs!

We took a look at out first day project, a glyph I found on Pinterest. Our people showed whether we were a boy or a girl, whether we walked or drove to school, and the number of people in our family. It was a fun activity for the first day and a great introduction to sorting and graphing.

What We Learned About By Playing With our Math Kit

We played with: Cube-alinks(connecting cubes) small toys like Dinos, cars, food, animals Frameworks Geoboards Geometric tiles Square tiles One classmate found out that blocks are not a good choice for buidling a tower, because they fall over. But, we decided that we learned a great deal from this. We learned that some manipulatives are better for different things. For example, connecting cubes are better for towers because they stick to each other and won't fall over. Most importantly, we learned that we need to make "mistakes" to figure things out and to learn. We all agree we already knew that it is fun to play and learn.

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Work on your Sight Words AND Have Fun!

Check out the free iPhone and iPad app for Spellingcity. Once you download it, search for Elizabeth Jinks under search for a teacher and start with Dolch 1. Have fun checking out the different games! You can always go to spellingcity.com on your computer as well!

Looking forward to another great year of learning!