Almost Break Time

We're getting close to March Break but still working hard. Despite the snow squalls we had this week, everyone had a full week of school. We've been using the SMARTBOARD quite a lot and I have to say that I love it. I'm pretty sure the students do too because they're always anxious to get a turn to use it. This week we took a close look at sentences. We looked at complete and incomplete sentences and the reasons why they were complete or incomplete. On Thursday and Friday, we looked at run-on sentences, added the missing capitalisation and punctuation, and decided on where the sentences began and ended by listening carefully when the sentences were read aloud. Next week we'll explore sentences further by looking at subjects and verbs.

The grade twos looked at the "ette/ète" sound in "La chouette" and the "al/ale/alle" sound in "Le narval". The grade threes began looking at the "ab/ob/ad/ap" sounds in "La capture de l'adversaire" they aren't finished the reading response questions so we will continue to work on that story next week. In the reading ateliers, the class explored some new books on the computer for the listening centre. There are some great websites for listening to stories and reading along. For a reading game, we returned to activities requiring the students to read and put words in alphabetical order. The students continued to work on explanations with me in our guided writing groups. They are getting much better at ensuring that they have completed the ideas in their sentences/paragraphs. 

In math, we continued to work on two- and three-digit addition. Despite a few small computation errors, they seem to understand regrouping quite well, especially when we use the virtual manipulatives on the SMARTBOARD. We spent one math period working on subtraction with regrouping. They liked the visual representation with the manipulatives on the SMARTBOARD but will need a bit more discussion and hands-on practice before they'll be comfortable doing it with paper/pencil. Our homework over the next while will continue to be addition and subtraction practice as this is an important skill to master. 

I did a little more organizing this week as I found we'd have to sort the pencil crayons/markers every few weeks because some boxes would end up with lots and others would barely have any. I bought 5 colours of duct tape, one for each group. Then everything in the group bins were labeled with a colour. That way if something is on the floor, we'll know exactly which bin to put it back in. It's also going to help the students take more responsibility for caring for the class supplies. I topped up each pencil crayon box with new pencil crayons as we were getting low on some colours and some were getting too small to sharpen. 

One more week until March Break. Have a great weekend everyone!