The children truly enjoyed our last Unit 'Me and my Body' and were able to talk about the body and reasons to keep it strong and healthy. It's time for a new unit of inquiry and our next unit is entitled 'From Field to Table' !The children will take their knowledge and investigate the changes/processes foods go through before they reach our tables. We will be cooking at some point in this unit! I will let you know when our cooking sessions will take place in case you would like to cook some simple foods with us!

The children enjoyed the story 'I like what I am' and had the opportunity to further explore the long/i-e/ and /ie/ sound.Next week ,we will be reviewing long/a/ and long /i/. The children are really excited about creating a book with their partner. They are writing words to a picture book and discussing their ideas together as a team. The children keep using strategies when writing as well as using newly acquired words and vocabulary.

Place value has proven to be a challenge. We've been working with cubes,sticks and recording our observations. A tower of ten, a bundle of ten, ten ones,1 ten, ones; the terminology can be a bit confusing ! Next week we will keep investigating place value, number bonds to 10 and we will be working on a number line and adding numbers to 20. In our new unit of inquiry, we will focus on measurement!

We are off on another fieldtrip to the Gulbenkian on Tuesday the 3rd of November. This is part of our Music/Art program. Full details were sent last Friday. Make sure you have sent in your field trip permission forms. Our last field trip was to the Art Museum at the Gulbenkian. We took a mini tour of the museum.(Pictures will follow soon) We learned about the paintings and the colors artists used in the paintings. The children were quite engaged with the discussions on colors and in all it was an informative and exciting field trip. The upcoming fieldtrip focuses on dance!

I will be away on Thursday Nov. 5, Friday Nov.6 and Mon. Nov. 9, 2009. I will be attending a PYP workshop. There will be a substitute teacher in class. Therefore we will have 'Show and Tell' only on Monday and Wednesday this week because on Tuesday we will be on our 2nd Field trip to the Gulbenkian.

Our Unit of Inquiry ' A Strong and Healthy Body is my Responsibility' is coming to an end. It has been an exciting unit and the children are telling me about decisions they have taken. " I told my mom to give me carrots for snack time", "I drank water all day long", "I haven't eaten sugar for 10 days!", " I went to bed at 8 o'clock ", 'I ran around the playground before school' even 'I rested my brain", are some of the comments I have heard children make this past week! This week, we looked at sleeping patterns and how sleep is important to our health. Children should bring in their sleep recording sheets to school on Monday!

Our story of the week in reading was 'Bike Hike'. The children enjoyed this story and were able to relate to it. We investigated the long /i-e/ sound with magic 'e' as well as the /ie/ vowel combination making a long /e/ sound. Long /i-e/ and /ie/ were a bit more confusing but we will review them again next week. We also reviewed the short /e/ sound to reinforce what we had previously learned. The children are beginning to expand their writing skills.They are being risk takers by stepping out of their comfort zone ;attempting to use new vocabulary and exploring decoding strategies with confidence. Many children are beginning to self-correct their mistakes and read over what they have written. Way to go!

This week in maths, we have started our investigations into place value. What is base ten?What does twelve mean and how can we make twelve? Where do we place 12 on our place value mat and what does the '1' and '2' mean? We are tackling a story problem per day and the children love story problem time! We are practising our number bond rhyme and we are getting good at figuring out each bond! It's fun!

This week, Thursday, we are off on a field trip to the Gulbenkian. This is part of our art/ music program. Full details about the field trip will be attached to your diaries. Make sure you have signed a Field Trip Permission form! We would like to thank Mrs.Balazs,our music teacher, for arranging this field trip!

This week in our unit of Inquiry ' Me and my Body', we wrote out the recipe for 'Ants on a Log', and completed making our fruit and vegetable people. We can now look at them and be reminded that eating fruits and vegetables are important for good health and affect parts of our bodies such as our heart, brain, liver and even lungs! We compiled information on exercise taken from our P.E.classes and we were able to tally our findings and graph them using different colors for different exercise.Which exercises were the favorites? Running and Jumping! Take a look at our video and watch us exercise in a Tae Kwan Do demonstration class. ( Sorry but the video is a bit short! Trying for the first timeto upload to the blog!)

Exercising is fun!

This week we learned about exercising in a responsible way. Watch us exercise and take part in Tae Kwan Do class with Ms. Theresa. She told us that this exercise was about using our mind and muscles to protect ourselves. Tae Kwan Do must never be used to harm people and animals. We can never use the Tae Kwan Do moves when playing as this might hurt our friends. Exercise is used to keep our bodies strong and healthy!

The children continued their investigations into the short and long /a/ sound. They enjoyed the story 'Dave and the Raft' and were able to recognize the long a sound /a-e/ and /ai/. When reading with the children, ask them to explain the difference between short and long /a/. Next week we will discover what makes the long /i/ sound. Children enjoyed writing the recipe for the 'Ants on the Log'. The children are referring to known words and exploring new words when writing creative stories.

This week in maths we continued our investigations to 20! We explored number bonds to 10. Ask your child to recite the poem about number bonds to 10! This is a strategy used for quick recall of number bonds. We reviewed the concept of more and less and played a game jumping forwards and backwards from any given number by 2's and 3's. This began our review of addition and subtraction concepts.

The children are enjoying our Unit of Inquiry 'A Healthy and Strong Body is my Responsibility'. This week we had a guest speaker, a tri-athlon athlete, talk to us about exercise. We warmed up and exercised in our classroom. Bailey's mom, who is a nurse, came to speak to us about our bodies and which vegetables are associated with our organs. She brought celery, carrots, raisins and cream cheese and showed us how to prepare a healthy snack called' Ants on a Log". Guess which foods were the ants and the log? The raisins and the celery! The children are enjoying making vegetable people out of paper. They must be able to tell me why they used certain vegetables and why these vegetables are good for healthy bodies.

The children investigated the long /a-e/ sound in the story 'Kate & Jake'. We explored the magical/e/ at the end of the sound and learned how the short /a/ sound is changed to a long /a/ by saying the name of the letter. It was even more interesting to learn that two vowels/ai/ work together to say the name of the first letter. Each day we write in our journals and write about our activities the previous day. We are also using our imagination to write creative stories and stories based on our bodies and healthy eating.

The children this week have enjoyed working with number bonds to 10 and exploring different strategies used when working with bonds. The children worked with manipulative cards to investigate vocabulary used when working with numbers to 20. When counting, how many different ways can a number be written? We reviewed ordinal numbers to 10 and looked at patterns when ordering numbers to 20; 4th to 20th are easier as they end in /th/.