Ms. Vanderwel's Room

We made it! It's finally the Winter Break! The kids have worked very hard and are ready for a bit of a rest : )  Below are some highlights from this week. We will see everyone back at school on January 6th. I hope everyone has a relaxing and enjoyable break. Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all that are celebrating!  -------------------------------------------------------------------- In language arts we have continued to review the letter sounds for a number of letters. Students review all sounds taught every day, work on building and sounding out words using the sounds covered since the start of the year and read books in their reading groups that include words with those letter sounds and some HFW (high frequency words) that are more difficult (e.g. is, as, to, do, the, said etc). to decode but are necessary to be able to read beginning text. We regularly review these words as well. In writing students continue to work on fixing sentences looking for capitals, spaces a...

Hello and Happy Fri-yay! I hope you all had a wonderful week! The countdown is on to our Winter Break and the kids are getting excited : ) There are many exciting activities and events planned for this week. Read on to find out about those and what we have been up to this week.  -------------------------------------- This week in language arts we began talking about consonant clusters (sometimes called consonant blends) for the letters /r/ and /l/ (e.g. cr, br, fr, cl, bl, fl etc.). These letter combinations can be found in many words and sometimes sound like one sound but are really two sounds that have been blended together. Students listened for these sounds in words, played some fun online games to reinforce this concept and made words using our moveable alphabet that had various clusters in them.  In math, we finished up our Counting Collections activities in which students learned to count larger collections (up to 100) of objects by 2s, 5s and 10s. We discussed why skip...

Hello Everyone! What an amazing performance by the students at EMJ last night and.  especially our very own Grade Ones! They were fantastic! Keep reading to see what else we have been up to this week : )  --------------------------------------------------- In language arts we have been learning about 'how-to' or procedural writing. To start we talked about why we write-- to entertain, inform, teach, instruct etc. Then we looked specifically at giving instructions. The students gave me the steps to make a Wow butter and jam sandwich with some hilarious results! Then we made popcorn and the students worked in groups to write down and draw the steps to make popcorn. We also ate some popcorn so that made it even more fun!  In math, we have continued to learn about counting collections of objects and representing those numbers in a variety of ways. We also started learning how to estimate. Students learned that an estimate is a 'smart guess'. For example, when shown a jar of...