O Come, Let Us Adore Him

Christmas break is upon us! During Advent, our students were able to deepen their faith and prepare their hearts with kindness for the coming of Jesus. 

Have a look at our journey through Advent!

May your families be blessed with peace, joy and health throughout this Christmas season!

Christmas blessings and lots of love, 

Mrs. Beliveau

Advent: Joyful 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. 

Each Monday, we celebrate with a school-wide virtual assembly. At our daily Connection Time, we will always begin each day with a cozy little Advent celebration. 

This week, we reflected on the birth of Christ by making our own torn paper advent wreaths. These will come home prior to Christmas break. 

As we journey towards Christmas, may we prepare our hearts with kindness as we joyfully wait for the coming of Jesus!

Strong Sentences!

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

We began closely examining what a sentence was this past week. 

We learned three things every sentence has:

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

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

... and then continued our sorting independently!

During our writing blocks, we are practicing following the writing process, by brainstorming, drawing, labelling, writing and sharing.

Writing strong sentences is a skill we will work on throughout the whole 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. 

Kids Who Wiggle!

We wiggle. We shimmy. We squirm, we twist, we bounce! It is highly possible there are ants. In. Our. Pants. Lots of 'em! 6 year-olds just aren't built to sit still, so we change activities about every 5 to 15 minutes. The boys and girls are certainly not expected to sit still all day!

Given that we are the wiggle experts of St. Nicholas, it only made sense that we read the book Lines that Wiggle!

Here is a reading of our wonderful, wiggly story:

Throughout this book is a raised, sparkly blue line that we all loved to touch! This story shared many types of lines that we see in our world. 

We got to work practicing our lines ...

 ... and drew 5 or 6 across a white page. Then we added a small black frame and got to work colouring each "piece" inside the frame.

Look at this colourful, creative work! 

What wiggly, squiggly masterpieces!

Lines inspired from This Old Art Room. 

Lines That Wiggle art project inspired from Mrs. T's First Grade Class. 

We Remember

This year, Remembrance Day falls during our Fall Break. To help the children better understand this special day, we spent lots of time this week learning about it's significance. How have others made our world peaceful? How can we thank them? How can we be peaceful? Our focus this week was peace.  

We  took time to read Todd Parr's "The Peace Book", a wonderful story reflecting on simple moments of peace we experience throughout the day. 

Inspired by the story, we took time to reflect and made a book together about when we experience peace.

Peace is (a) playing in my bed (b) when my mom is with me
(c) resting under a tree in the hot sun, and (d) doing my nails. 

We also read Beautiful Hands and I Call My Hand Gentle. Together we wondered, "How can we be kind, gentle and peaceful with our hands?". 

Look at our beautiful  projects, highlighting our peaceful hands.

Today we will gather as a school community to pray, remember, and express gratitude for all of those who have worked and are currently working for peace. 

What a meaningful week. Hopefully the boys and girls are able to look at the poppies on their collars with a little more understanding and a lot more gratitude. 

Halloween Can't Scare Us!

We began our week enjoying The UnScary Book, about a little boy who wants to write a very scary, spooky, terrifying book. It all goes sideways when lovely, nice things show up to be in the book instead! We had a blast being creative and writing our own "unscary" pages, and enjoyed reading one another's work!

Warmed up and ready to write, the kiddos got to work creating their own spooky pattern stories, modeled after It Didn't Frighten Me!

Here is the criteria they followed:

The boys and girls worked over several days to complete their stories. 

Here are a few pages from these amazing books:

These spooky stories will come home today! Happy Halloween!

Making Connections When We Read

Reading becomes so much more meaningful when we are able to personally connect with the text. This past few days we have been focusing on making a personal connection with what we are reading. This means the children have been challenged to connect the story to their own life, own experiences, and own feelings. 

We enjoyed reading several books appropriate for the Halloween season! The boys and girls made meaningful text-to-self connections using these texts!

In "Creepy Carrots", we meet Jasper Rabbit, who loves carrots, until they turn on him and become scary! We connected with the story by sharing our favourite food to snack on!

Next we enjoyed the story "Where's My Mummy?"! Where is little mummy's mama? Little mummy felt scared without mama! Here are our personal connections:

"The Littlest Pumpkin" is about a teeny tiny pumpkin that nobody picks from the pumpkin patch.  The boys and girls thought of a time they felt disappointed. 

"Crankenstein" features an ordinary kid who can become very cranky! What makes us cranky?

Watch for these activities to come home soon and continue to reinforce those personal connections as your child reads. Connecting to the text is an excellent way to increase and develop your child's comprehension!

Where's My Mummy activity from Deanna Jump's unit. 
The Littlest Pumpkin activity from Cara Carroll. 
Crankenstein activity from Falling Into First. 
Creepy Carrots inspired by Anita Bremmer. 

Building Numeracy: Junk It Game!

In case you haven't heard, we were introduced to a fast-paced card game, Junk It! It helps us recognize numerals and order them to 10. 

Junk It is a 2-player game. Remove face cards, but keep Aces. 

Put 10 cards in two rows of 5 face down in front of each player. Place the remaining cards in the centre. 

The first player flips a card over, and places it in its numerical spot. 

He picked up a 3 ... 

... so he'll put it down where the 3 goes. 

When he placed his card in the 3 spot, he picked up a 4 (formerly face down in the 3rd place). Off the 4 goes to spot 4!

Notice how when he put his 4 down, he picked up the card in that spot? It's another 3! He already has a 3, so he gets to call JUNK IT and discard it in the middle. 

His opponent can either pick up the card that was just discarded, or select a new card from the pile. She chose to pick up from the pile. 

The first player to get all 10 cards flipped over in order wins! Isn't learning more fun when it's a game?

It is a little confusing to explain on our blog, but the kids are definitely the experts! Will you challenge your child to a game of Junk It?!?

Fabulous Fall Photo Hunt

Since school began, we have been exploring the seasonal changes in Fall! 

We've been hard at work discovering what animals are up to, how trees change, what plants are doing (think gardens!), and how we change our activities, clothing, and often what we eat in the Fall. 

This week we did a quick check-in, grabbing sticky notes and jotting down a picture and/or word describing what we have learned so far about Fall:

Let's share some signs of Fall around us over the next few days! Here is how our photo hunt challenge works:

We have a "virtual wall" below where we can all contribute our signs of Fall. 

First, ask your child to take a picture showing a sign of Fall.

Then, to share your child's photo / comment:

(a) Click on the pink plus sign on our "Fall in Love with Fall" virtual wall below. 

(b) Type in a comment and upload a picture. Ta da!

(c) Be dazzled with all the signs of Fall we have discovered!

Thank you for not mentioning first or last names on our blog. If you run into any hiccups, feel free to email your photos and captions and I'll happily post them for you. (Hot tip: Adding photos tends to work better from a computer, rather than a phone). 

What signs of Fall can we find?

Gratitude and Thanks

This week we spent a little extra time exploring how blessed we truly are. Our blessings so are abundant and we seized every opportunity we could to thank God!

With just the mention of the word "thankful", the students' hands were shooting up and ideas were overflowing. They were bursting with gratitude!

Then the students (and their teacher) all had the opportunity to practice perseverance and patience! We tackled a challenging Thanksgiving project ... woven place mats!

We began by writing and colouring.

Then the students learned to weave paper strips over, under, over, and under. Many also showed off their patterning skills!

Amazing work! These will, without a doubt, be the center of the Thanksgiving tables this weekend!

We have been blessed beyond measure and it is so important to take time and give thanks. God is indeed SO GOOD! 

If you and your family are feeling energetic and grateful this long weekend, give this scavenger hunt from Natural Beach Living a try together!