Parent Workshop from Kathy Collins

100th Day of School

clipart by Philip Martin

Dear Parents,

Our 100th day of school is fast approaching (this Thursday, February 2nd!) and to celebrate we are doing some activities that focus on 100. Your child will be bringing home a letter today describing an activity involving a bottle filled with 100 items. (To see an electronic version of this letter, please click here.)

Also coming home is a request detailing how you might help your child find 100 food items s/he can bring in to help build a group snack. Thanks for looking for this information tonight in your child's green take-home bag.

Early dismissal Wednesday

Please be reminded that this Wednesday school will be dismissed at 11:30 due to Timket. We will not have school on Thursday or Friday. 

An inquiry into the word 'play'

We spent some time last week exploring words in a bit more detail. This originated from several students asking questions about how to spell certain suffixes (or ends) of words. We began with the word play as this is an easy base on which to add suffixes, and a word with which students are familiar.

We began our exploration by identifying what it means to play. Most students were able to articulate that it means to "do something for fun". We found out that this is a base word -- meaning that it makes sense and can stand on its own. It can have prefixes and suffixes added to it.

Now that we identified and explained what the word play means, we were able to also name some other words that are built using the word play. These words (i.e. plays, playing, playground) - along with a few extras thrown in (i.e. playful) - were used for the next part of our inquiry.

Students were broken into partners and each partnership was given a word containing the base word play. They were then instructed to figure out what each word meant based on our prior knowledge of what it means to play. Once that was determined, the next step was to illustrate their word in order to explain it to others:

 

We gathered at the carpet and shared our words. We identified suffixes and briefly discussed the meaning of each.

It was then time to see if this inquiry into the word play transferred into other learning situations. How amazing it was to see that several students began using -- and understanding -- suffixes during writing workshop:

We already have another word inquiry in which to partake that was inspired by the students themselves. Why and when do some words end in the phoneme /ē/ but are spelled with a <y>? Stay tuned to see what we find out!

To find out more about Structured Word Inquiry and how word inquiry works with young leaners, check out Lyn Anderson's amazing blog!

Welcome back!

Our first day back from winter break has been great so far as we have had a chance to reconnect and share our holiday experiences. This morning we made maps of our holiday journeys and then shared them with one another while enjoying blueberry scones.

Take a moment to enjoy our ThinkLink creations. Hover over the red 'play' buttons to hear us tell about our journeys:

We later spent some time constructing while revisiting measurement. We were asked to work in pairs to try and build the tallest free-standing tower. We then used cubes as our measurement tool and saw that Anastasia and Jude built the tallest tower - 26 cubes. It was then decided that we should look at which tower was built with the most amount of Lego pieces, and surprisingly the shortest tower (built by Storm and Nathan) had the most pieces with a total of 145! We realized that width and height are very different!

 

We look forward to getting back into the swing of things this week. I hope you all had a lovely holiday!