Ms. Vanderwel's Room

Hello and Happy Friday! It's hard to believe the month of September is al.most over! Time sure flies! This has been a busy week with lots of special events and activities. Take a look!                        ------------------------------------------------------------------ In Language arts we reviewed the sounds of /s/ and /i/. We continued to build words using our movable alphabet and practiced blending letters to sound out words. We also continued to develop our ear to listen for beginning and ending sounds in words, listen for syllables and break words down into their syllables. This week in math students were introduced to the skill of subitizing. Subitizing is the ability to count a set of objects at-a-glance rather than one-by-one. In order to do this students must learn to look for patterns or groups in a set of objects that lets them quickly group and count the items. For example, when shown a set of dots for only a fe...

Hello and Happy Friday! Thank you to all the families that came out for our 'Meet the Teacher' event on Thursday evening. It was great to meet everyone : )  Here's a sneak peek at our work this week! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------ In Language Arts we have been working on reviewing two more letter sounds-- /m/ and /s/. Students again used their moveable alphabet to create words listening carefully to the sounds in each. They also sorted pictures into groups based on the beginning sound and completed an activity sheet identifying words with the same beginning sounds.  They also learned about "Heart Words". These are words that cannot be sounded out using regular letter sounds because the letters do not follow the normal pronunciation. For example, 'said' and 'the'. We have to learn these words "by heart" (i.e. memorize them).  Heart Word Magic In math we have started to learn about the t...

  It's been our first full week of school! Continue reading to see what we have been up to! ------------------------------------------------------------------------ This week we reviewed the letter /a/ and the sound it makes. We listened for the short a sound in words and built words using our Making Words cards (movable alphabet). The grade 1s built some two and three part words (e.g. an, at, ant) while the grade 2s were challenged to build some harder words (eg. after, antler) using their sound symbol knowledge. In writing we listened to a story about things you can see at school. Then the students completed pattern sentences ( I see...)  using their letter sound knowledge to sound out words in their writing. In math we continued to review numbers to 10 and 20 in grade 1 and up to 100 for the grade 2s. We played bingo, completed a 'Write the Room' challenge, built numbers using ten frames (Gr.1) and with base ten blocks (Gr.2). We also worked on accurately counting sets o...

Hello Parents! This is the first blog post of the year. Each week I will be posting what we have been learning throughout the week, as well as, upcoming information about school events, holidays etc. Please bookmark this site so that you can quickly and easily access it at any time for information regarding your child's learning. Thank you! We have been busy these couple weeks getting to know each other, establishing relationships and building our classroom community. Check out the photos below to see what we have been up to : )  ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- This week and last students have been having fun getting to know each other and learning about their classmates. They worked on creating some art using their names and completing an 'All About Me' booklet. They even worked on a self-portrait with impressive results! Last Friday, after watching a short video on the history or ice cream, students got a chance to make some...