Glory to God in the Highest!

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!

We're Coding Kids!

This past week, we embarked on a coding adventure! Simply put, coding is creating instructions. A fleet of little TaleBot robots joined our class and we learned how to have them follow our directions. 

We met the TaleBots and worked in pairs to learn how to use their command buttons. The commands allow the TaleBots to move forward and back, turn left and right, and even dance! 

Pairs were challenged to code the TaleBot to move around a block or two. There was lots of trial and error (and squeals of joy!) as we problem solved, discussed, and corrected our code. The spaces on the mat helped us count out our commands. 

We examined a zoo-themed coding mat and were challenged to write a story all about the zoo! 

The stories are about TaleBots who visit the zoo. What animal do they want to see at the zoo first? Next? Last? 

Once our zoo stories were written, we got back into teams. Using our story, we coded the TaleBot to retell our very own stories!

What a fantastic day of learnning! Watch for your child's Tale Bot Visits the Zoo story coming home today!

Advent: Preparing our Hearts for the Birth of Christ

This past Sunday marked the first Sunday of Advent. 

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

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

As the liturgical seasons change, so does our prayer cloth and prayer table. We changed our prayer table cloth from green (Ordinary Time) to purple (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 morning, we have a daily Advent celebration, either at our weekly Monday
assembly or at our classroom Connection Time. 

Has your child mentioned our Shepherd? Each day during Advent, we hunt for the Shepherd. He is hidden around our school, and when we find him, his scripture message helps is draw closer to Jesus. 

As a school, we are rooting ourselves in Christ through the tradition of the Jesse Tree. We are decorating the Jesse Tree with an ornament or two each day that symbolizes key people and events from the Old Testament, leading us to the Birth of Christ. It is a beautiful way to hear about God's love for us through biblical events. We even created our own Jesse Trees and enjoy adding the daily symbol(s)!

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

The Power of our Breath

In life, we as adults know that challenges are inevitable and big emotions will come. Here in class, we're working on experiencing big emotions without being overwhelmed by them. We talked about big feelings we all have felt, such as fear, worry, and anger. We can't avoid these feelings, so how can we move through them? We read Magic Breath, a book that can help us when our feelings feel big. 

We practiced taking deep "magic breaths', and letting the air out slowly. 

We loved making visual reminders of the power of our breath when we have big feelings. A little paint and sparkle brought lots of joy to our room!

We integrate deep breathing into our day in different ways and at different times. Breathing is one tool that can help us move through big feelings. 

Fifty Days of Friendship!

Today we celebrated our 50th day of learning together with a little fun ... we made Friendship Fruit Salad and had a Pigeon Painting Party!

We all brought fruit to share, and together it made an amazing snack, much like how we make an amazing classroom family when we are all together!

We love the Mo Willem's "pigeon" book series, so following a step by step guided drawing, we drew our own Pigeon. Then we used crayon and watercolour paint to create a creative, bright party!

We are so blessed and have so much to be thankful for; the friendships we have made, the learning and growth we have experienced, and the kindness we show one another. Today was a meaningful (and delicious) way to connect with each other!

Looking forward to the adventures that await! The first 50 days have been fantastic!

We Are The Hands of Christ

We are called to be the hands and feet of Christ. Remembrance Day is a wonderful opportunity to make kindness, peacefulness, and service our focus. 

As we often do, literacy drove these topics:

We read Beautiful Hands and wondered, "How can we be kind, gentle and peaceful with our hands?". 

Painting and writing made our ideas come alive!

We spent some quiet time creating some beautiful "stained glass windows" that can be hung at home during the fall break as a reminder to pray for all peacemakers. 

We worked the small muscles in our hands and created these little masterpieces: 

Today, we gathered as a school community to pray, remember, and express gratitude for all 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. May we all use our hands for gentleness and peace, as we are Christ's hands here on earth. 

UNSCARY Stories!

We began our week enjoying The UnScary Book, a story by Nick Bland about a little boy who wants to write a very scary, spooky, terrifying book. 

It all goes sideways when lovely, nice things show up in the book instead! Rainbows, ice cream, bunnies, and even Grandma all arrive in this very UNSCARY book!

We decided to create our own unscary stories! Students were introduced to a Colouring Rubric last week and were challenged to follow the rubric when creating their illustrations.

We had a blast being creative and writing our own "unscary" pages and enjoyed reading one another's work! 

Our colouring rubric is now an expectation whenever we tackle a project with any colouring. It will help us to our best! These stories will be coming home in the next few days for you to enjoy. 

We Are Sentence Smarties!

When we started Grade 1 together, we knew the sounds the letters make and a few words, too (thank you Mrs. Dziwenko!). 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:

Then 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 are practicing writing our own complete sentences! In a few weeks we'll learn how to independently use the criteria checklist, in the top right corner.

Writing strong sentences is a skill we will work on throughout the year. We've got so much progress to be proud of!

Colouring Criteria

This past week, the students were introduced to the word criteria.  

As a class, we created criteria to follow when we are drawing, colouring or illustrating.

Using a familiar picture from our most recent religion lesson, students put the colouring criteria into action! 

Students were sure to check our colouring criteria to ensure their illustrations were amazing. Next week we will be writing and illustrating our very own Halloween stories, so this colouring criteria will help us become successful illustrators! Stay tuned!

Alphabet Celebration!

We have so much learning to celebrate! Over the past few weeks, we have worked very hard to learn all 26 letters and sounds, and we are proud to announce that we are becoming Alphabet Experts!

To celebrate this achievement, our hard working crew had a little Alphabet Celebration! 

The kids were thrilled to handle the decor!

Armed with clipboards and pencils, the students hunted for pictures high and low. Their task was to sketch the image and print the beginning sound. These kids are sure up for the challenge!

Pani Lynne, our Linking Generations senior, came with a silly alphabet book, B is for Bedtime Bananas!

Pani Lynne led Alphabet Bingo with small groups:

Children enjoyed letter puzzles, 

a "shake and find" jar filled with coloured rice and hidden letters, 

and a challenging ABC I Spy!

We'll be forging ahead, putting these sounds together to create simple CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words, such as "pig" or "jam"! We are well on our way to becoming strong readers!

Thank You, God!

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

We were challenged with a wonderful opportunity to practice perseverance. After a short prayer asking God for patience and grace, the students learned to weave paper strips over, under, over, and under. Fantastic effort! Many also showed off their patterning skills.

A little writing and colouring, and our placemats were ready! 

What beautiful masterpieces!

This week we read Apple Pie Tired, a beautiful story about teamwork and generosity. Inspired, we came together as a classroom family and followed step by step directions to make apple tarts. 

What a delight to share a delicious treat together as a classroom family!

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