Advent: A Season of Waiting

 This past Sunday marked the first Sunday of Advent. 

We have been learning about the liturgical calendar. Can your child point out Advent?

Advent is a time of hope and anticipation. We are waiting for the birth of Christ!

We changed our prayer table cloth from green, when it was Ordinary Time, to purple for Advent. Can you see our wreath? We light one candle for each of the four Sundays in Advent. This week we lit the first candle. As we light more candles each week, our world becomes brighter, symbolizing our growing anticipation of Jesus, who is the light of our world. 

At mass, the priest now wears purple vestments, the altar has a purple table cloth, and the advent wreath is displayed. 

Today our class led a school-wide virtual assembly, celebrating the first week of Advent and lighting the candle of hope. 

Families can share in our celebration from home:

Each morning, we will have a little Advent celebration during our daily Connection Time. As we journey towards Christmas, may we prepare our hearts with kindness as we joyfully wait for the coming of Jesus!

Sentence Superstars!

When we started Grade 1 together, we knew the sounds the letters make (thank you, Mrs. Sombyk and Miss Wilson!) and a few words. You'll never believe it, but we are now working on writing FULL SENTENCES! 

We really began examining what a sentence was this past Monday. 

We learned three things every sentence has:

Mrs. Beliveau revealed her hidden talent ... rapping!

We sorted letters, words and sentences as a class ... 

... and then continued our sorting independently!

As a class, we worked together to correct sentences, adding capitals and end punctuation. 

Using supported sentence frames, we practiced writing our own complete sentences! Soon we'll learn how to use the criteria checklist, in the top right corner.

Writing strong sentences is a skill we will work on throughout the year! Support your child by finding sentences in the books you read, by identifying components of a sentence in our daily agenda message, and by writing sentences together ... the sillier the better!

"Is It a Sentence" poster was from here. 
Pete the Cat Letter, Word and Sentence sort was from here. 

Spend a Morning in Grade 1!

Ever wondered that a morning in Grade 1 looks like? Come spend some time with us! Although the pandemic has changed how we move through our day, our learning continues to be rich and our classroom community strong. 

We begin each day in a similar way. After announcements and agendas, we head to the empty room next door for Connection Time! We always begin with prayer. Then we greet each other in different ways each day . . . and today was a dancing greeting! "1, 2, 3, 4, Come on (student), hit the floor! We're so glad you're here today! Hooray! Hooray! Hooray!"

Then we all share our news! Today we heard about wiggly teeth, a cat's birthday, a new outfit, a homemade movie theatre, and a show and tell that was earned from reading!

Then we solve a social problem as a class, and close Connection Time with a carefully chosen story. For more about our daily Connection Time, click here!

We head back to our classroom to count our days! We also work with the same poem or rhyme all week long. This allows the children to build their reading fluency. This week's focuses on reading with expression.  

Can you believe we have only been in class for 40 minutes?!?

We sharpen our literacy and numeracy skills using our daily Building Skills activity!

We are starving! Snack time, and then out for recess! Each day our grade 1 cohort has a different place to play. Today we are on the big wooden park!

Back inside and we are off to buddy read! We re-read the home reading book we took home last night to a friend, then quietly exchange for a new book. 

Each day we review our 5 weekly words, and today we played an individual dice game and did some play dough to practice!

Today in Math we continued to focus on writing addition sentences. We acted out a variety of problems, and recorded the addition sentence on our whiteboards. We also practiced this skill in our math books, too! 

Thank you for "joining" us in our classroom for a morning. Please know that I very much miss having family members present in our school, and it is my hope that this post helps you get a feel for what learning looks like during this pandemic. These children have adapted to the protocols and we have created a wonderful classroom family to learn with each day.