Our focus this week was on short vowel u. Our words were: cut, nut, run, fun, sun.

The students had many opportunities to write this week and are continuing to do a great job at using their letter-sound knowledge to sound out words to the best of their ability as well as reference the room for words we have posted. It is exciting to see their eyes light up when they remember where they can go to find the word they want. I've had students looking through their reading books, at posters hung up in the classroom, and at our daily visual schedule. The students are definitely becoming resourceful!

We also continued to work at identifying the following digraphs/consonant blends at the beginning at end of words - sh, th, ch, and wh and did a fun word hunt in the classroom to find and sort many words containing these blends.

This week in Math we did some work identifying numbers as even and odd, worked to solve an open-ended word problem, and did an activity where the students worked with a ten frame and counters to come up with as many ways they could to make ten. They also learned how to write an addition equation to represent their findings.

Now that most of the students have shared their family photos with their classmates, we did a family portrait in the Visual Journal and the students wrote a sentence about the people in their family. I will include photos of the portraits in next week's blog.

Mrs. Carter told us about a fantastic live webcam set up on Grouse Mountain in Vancouver. The camera is set on a man-made "hibernation station" for two grizzly bears. We have thoroughly enjoyed checking in on these two throughout the week to see what hibernating bears really do all day! Here is the link for your viewing pleasure.  https://www.grousemountain.com/web-cams/bear-den-cam

This is what it looks like:

We met up with our Grade 4 buddies again this week and did a creative activity based on the book, This is Not a Box by Antoinette Portis. 

Each buddy group was challenged to take a given shape or line and transform it into something using their imaginations. Here are some examples:

** Important Christmas Sharing Information **

We have started practicing songs and a poem for our upcoming Grade 1 Christmas Sharing. We will be sharing a total of 4 songs and a poem. This sharing will happen at 8:15am and again at 1:15pm on Thursday, December 14th in the West Wing open space of our school. Grade 1 parents, grandparents, and all other family members are encouraged to join us for one of these performances! 

We did not have our regular book exchange at the library this week due to the Book Fair. We will be going again this Tuesday. 

Thank you to everyone who is returning Home Reading books each Friday. I will be sending home a game for you to play with your child this week to review and practice some of the CVC words we have been working with in class.

Please keep your eyes open for a letter regarding an upcoming class activity called Stone Soup. The letter will be sent home early next week.