Week of Jan 8th

 Welcome Back, and Happy New Year!

It was wonderful to see everyone back at school this week. We did not waste any time jumping back into our learning tasks. After working so hard on our Science food chain research projects, students were busy this week learning how to use the stop motion app and creating their claymation movies. We quickly discovered that teamwork is so important to successfully filming and moving our figures on the setting mats. Next week we hope to add our scripts to the films and share our movies with you and the rest of the class. When your child has finished their movie, I will teach them how to be able to show it to you when they access their Gmail account. Please take the time to watch it and ask them what they have learned while doing this project.  

In math this week, we continued our unit about length and perimeter. We learned how to measure lengths in centimetres and metres, convert measurements from metres to centimetres, and back again. We also developed person referents for centimetres and metres and used these referents to estimate lengths and distances. Next week, we will extend our learning to include kilometres, compare and order measurements in the same and different units, and decide which units are most suitable for measuring specific distances. We have also learned how to estimate and measure perimeters of regular and irregular shapes.

In Language arts, we are beginning our unit on Fictional Story writing. We explored the importance of character traits. We learned that a trait is a way to describe a person or a character's physical trait ( how they look) or personality trait (how they behave).  We discovered that all characters have traits or aspects of their personality that describe them.  

Our phonic focus this week is the "ed" ending. It is important to know that verbs ending in "ed" can be pronounced in three different ways. The first way is /id/, such as "needed" or "wanted." The second way is with a /t/ sound, such as "watched". The third way is the /d/ sound, such as "called". Moving forward, it will be important that they begin to apply the "ed" ending to words instead of the letter "d" in isolation or the letter "t" for example I marchd down the street or I marcht down the street,