January 14, 2018

Hello Families,

We have been having fun learning a little bit about how life is different for our pen pals in Japan! We are working on our letters to respond to them to answer their questions and tell them about ourselves. Building this understanding of Japan is helping us develop an understanding of differences in the global community! Tomorrow, we are using Google Earth to take a virtual tour of some of the popular sights in Tokyo, Japan, as described by our pen pals!

Grade two friends are now beginning to edit their writing work as well to ensure accurate capitalization, punctuation, content and spelling. We have been practicing our editing with buddies first, as sometimes it is easier to identify errors in other peoples work than our own. Today, we also looked about when writing in the past tense, we can add an -ed ending to words, for example, play becomes played, pack becomes packed etc.

Grade one friends were introduced to addition since they are already experts at applying counting on strategies! They have been using the addition box to solve problems at speedy rates and are already demonstrating confidence in this newly learned skill!

Penguin First Draft

We have also been working on some penguin art as a whole class. As we continue to use feedback as a tool to make our work better, we completed a first draft (and sometimes second draft) of our penguins and then set specific goals about how we could improve our good copy work. Once everyone was happy with their good copy penguins, they traced the outlines and used pastel to shade the darker spots. The backgrounds were painted in cool watercolors such as green, blue, and purple. Last, we put everything together by cutting the penguin out and putting him on top of the watercolor background.

Penguin Second Draft

Wishing everyone well!

Dont forget:
Scholastic orders are due Friday, January 18th!
We are still looking for two more parent volunteers to join us for Clay for Kids on January 28 from 9:00-11:30am!

Thanks :)

Lindsay Brown