Starting Senses

Although we have touched on the ideas... read poetry about and used our senses, with prompts connected to seasonal changes and our community explorations...

We are staring a larger science focus on: 

how we use and protect our 5 major senses.  This will make a connection between our unit on senses and some basic health and safety considerations, especially how we practice safety as a scientist!

We will be sharing some of our learning about senses at the March student-led conferences!  

Today, we completed a "prior knowledge" representation - each our very own - a chance to show what we already know!

In Language Arts and Writing:
We practiced some more editing and reviewed the particular expectations for grade 1 writing:

- upper case I when it is a word (ie he is lonely and standing all alone)
- lower case letters throughout  my writing and in the middle of words like my name
- upper case letters for the first letter of people's names
- upper case first letter to start a sentence
- period at the end of my complete idea

We added an understanding about using lines from top to bottom and left to write, by showing we know that words should not be broken apart at the end of a line.  Rather, we need to look and decide if we are trying to fit in a word that is long or short and do we have space for it?  If not, then the whole word needs to move to the next line! Making sure that when we move to the next line for writing, that we go all the way back to the left margin again!  As well, did I leave a GREAT BIG empty space at the end of a line, but then put a small word on the next line! 

We are trying to pay attention to how we use the lines and spacing - to make sure there are only appropriate sized finger spaces between words, but NO spaces between letters in a word! 

In math:
We played a new circle game "I have... who has". We've done this often using base ten block representation of numbers, as well as the numeral format.  Our new game uses tally marks!  This means we have to remember how to count by 5's and count on from a last named "five group number".  This was hard today!

Students might benefit from creating tally marks at home to practice counting by 5's and representing numbers using tally marks!  We'll keep practicing at school!