Daily 5 Literacy and Daily 3 Math in Full Swing

It was another busy week, cut a little bit short today when I suddenly had to leave this afternoon to pick up one of my sons from school when he was sick.

In Language, we read "Maman" to review the "an" sound and it's many spellings. We also read "Crayons de couleur" where we focused on fluency and new vocabulary.

After weeks of building stamina and practising the various components of the Daily 5 (Les 5 au quotidian), we finally began doing all 5. We do three cycles a day with time for our weekly words/sentences and read aloud poems before, a brain/body break after the first cycle, and a reading or writing lesson before the last cycle. My guided groups have started and each day I see a group for reading and a group for writing. The last cycle allows me to work one-on-one with anyone who needs extra help or to do GB+ assessments.

This week's focused lesson in reading was on Comprehension. We looked at checking our understanding by using the key questions Who? What? Where? When? Why? We began reading "Le loop qui voulait faire le tour du monde". Not only is this from a great series of books with a funny and interesting main character, but I also use this book as a starting point for what we will be doing in Social Studies in Grade 2, where the students look at communities around the world. We have only read a few pages so far, where "le loup" has visited Paris, France, and London, England. We will begin looking at Europe in Social Studies and travel along with "le loup" to all of the places he visits.

In our guided reading groups, we are focusing on comprehension and how to pick out information from texts. The students read short paragraphs of a few sentences and then have to answer a question or two before moving on to the next part of the text. We are working on finding the sentence that provides the answer, then underlining that sentence before answering the question.

In our guided writing groups, we finished our activity on making complete sentences that included who, what, and when. Then we did activities using known vocabulary to answer questions but focusing on correctly writing the sounds using what they know about French sounds, our sound posters, and our class word wall.

Lots of writing during "Work on Writing"

While guided reading groups were with me, the others were all reading to self. When I met with guided writing groups, everyone else was doing work on writing. During the third cycle, one group listened to reading, two groups read to someone, and two groups did work on words activities.

We also began our Daily 3 Math Centres this week. When the students begin our math time, they continue to complete "Les maths pour tous les jours" focusing on a few questions from each math strand each day. Afterwards, they come to the carpet for a short "Math Talk" session. They have a question that they need to think about for a couple of minutes. They then share with an elbow partner. We finish by sharing with the entire group. Sometimes the questions will be about the process of solving the problem and sometimes they will need to figure out an answer and explain their strategy to the partner or group.

After our "Math Talk", we are doing two cycles of centres. This allows me to meet with every group twice in a five day cycle. While the guided group is doing writing in math with me, one group is playing Prodigy on the iPads. During the first cycle, the other three groups are doing math alone. During the second cycle, I again see a guided group, one group is playing Prodigy, and the other three groups are playing math games with their group. The math they do alone or in the games ties in with our math units. The math questions on Prodigy are set up by me at the beginning of each new unit and align with what we are doing in class also.

In gym, we continued to work on our soccer skills on Monday. On Tuesday, the students played in centres to work on balance and other fundamental movement skills.

In Science, the grade twos looked at the characteristics of birds and reptiles. The grade threes did an oral assessment with me where they explained the plant life cycle.

Unfortunately I had to leave today before we got to Social Studies. Hopefully I'll have some photos and an update on what we are doing next week.

In Visual Arts, the students are working on "Name Art". They drew the letters of their names so that they overlapped. They are working on colouring them in by changing colour every time they touch a line.

I hope everyone has a lovely long weekend with their family!