Mrs. Leusinks Gr 1 Blog

 Hello Grade 1 Families!  Students had so much fun on Tuesday at the Science Center, and they showed such awesome listening and respect to our community.  Two important terms that were taught were "potential energy", and "kinetic energy".  We then talked about different directions, and played some games in the gym to help further our understanding of direction and energy. Students also worked on following instructions, and learned about the words "on top, near, beside, below" and "above". This week students shared things that fill their hearts with happiness. They were encouraged to use the sentence starter "________ fills my heart with happiness because________". Students continued to colour, and come up with some ideas for their apple books as well.  This week students learned about 5 pairs, and worked hard on figuring out what two numbers can make up 5. They did such an awesome job, and by the end of the week they were challenged to ...

 

  Hello Grade 1 Families!  This week in Grade 1, we started our very own books! We talked about stories, and what stories include. We know that stories always have a main character, and each story has a sequence of events. We are beginning our books by first making the pictures into a "wow" picture, something we have been working on for a long time. We talked about how the artists in books don't leave white space, and how even the backgrounds are completely coloured. We had some amazing front pages, and everyone even came up with their own, unique title for their stories. Once their colouring is done, they write out their scribed sentence to their story, and use the picture to help them come up with ideas. We had lots of fun exploring some math games, reinforcing our counting skills, using ten frames, and tens rods. Students were put to the challenge this week, and did an activity on following directions. This activity involved many steps, so they had to have their listen...

Happy Long Weekend! I hope that everyone will have a restful weekend, especially after a full week of school!  This week students continued to work on the number of the day, and are getting very settled into the routine, so much so that they no longer have to refer to our poster on the wall. Students also worked on identifying, and writing numbers using 10's rods and 1's cubes. Students also created "10's rods" robots this week, and they were very proud of the work that they did. We worked together to identify how many 10's rods and 1's cubes they used to create their robots.  We have started practicing reading some decodables in class as well, and have been working hard at recognizing that some words have the same end sound, which means we only need to change the beginning sound. As a class, we have also been practicing identifying the sounds we hear in three-letter words, and writing them together. For example, the word "cat" has 3 sounds. We t...

Last week was a busy week exploring our 5 senses inside, and outside of the classroom. We started off our Monday with a beautiful walk up the hill to observe the downtown skyline. On our way up, we said "hello" to our friend, the tamarack tree. We noticed the tamarack is starting to turn even more yellow as the days have gotten colder. Once we got to the top of the hill, we used our senses to observe downtown. Students were encouraged to draw what they hear, what they feel (such as the cold wind), and what they can see.  We were able to see some notable landmarks of Calgary, such as the Saddledome, the Calgary Public Library, Bell Studio, and the Calgary Tower.  In science, we also explored our 5 senses by doing three different activities. First, we sorted through pictures and determined whether or not we would use our sense of taste, smell, sight, touch or hearing for each item/picture. The next day, students explored their senses through a variety of different "centers...