Congratulations to the children for doing such a wonderful job at Friday's assembly! They enjoyed singing songs related to our unit 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle !' and have a better understanding of the 3 R's. We read a story and discovered that there is actually a 4th R; we can also repair items before throwing them away! This week we have discovered what happens to the trash once it gets to the landfill and next week we will go and find out what happened to the trash we buried a few months back. This week we were busy making cards from recycled paper and from old cards. The children made beautiful cards and wrote a summary on how they had saved the environment by making homemade cards! Can you guess how they helped save the environment??

The long/e/ vowel has been our focus again this week in reading. We have been writing up a storm! Eggbert keeps us focused on his adventures in the toy store! We are becoming more aware of full stops and capital letters as we edit the sentences in his story. We have been busy writing short summaries about the projects we are creating in our Unit of Inquiry. The children continue reading decodable books and books related to our Unit.

In maths, we keep working on number sense and the number system. This week we played addition games and continued writing addition sentences to 20. We looked at strategies and ways of adding more than 2 numbers to make 10 and 20. We are exploring the relationship between addition and subtraction and enjoyed playing a game with number cards.We added 2 cards and used these numbers and their sum to construct subtraction sentences. We explored the number chart to 100 and looked at the concepts less/more, greater than. We counted on in 3's, counted backwards from any number to 100 and reviewed counted by 5's and 10's from any given number.

Our Unit of Inquiry' Reduce, Reuse, Recycle' is off to a great start! This week we have been discussing the central idea 'Our Personal Choices Affect our Environment' and reading non-fiction books about the 3'Rs and how our choices do indeed impact our environment. We explored the concept of 'Reuse" and created beautiful art out of reusable materials. Take a look! The pictures will be on display in our classroom and the PYP board located at the front of the school. This Friday we will do a presentation at assembly! Check your child's diary; I will send home the words to the songs. Please help your child practice at home. We will be in need of plastic bottles for our next project. Let your child bring in an empty plastic bottle (preferably larger 1000ml water bottles).Thank you!

This week in reading we reviewed all long vowels sounds and focused on the long 'e' sound. Long'e' can be tricky for some children as they confuse /ea/ with /ee/. We explored spelling patterns in words and came up with some strategies on how to differentiate between the spelling of words that are spelled with /ee/ or /ea/. We read the book 'Pete and the Beans'. Eggbert has joined our class. Ask your child about Eggbert and his adventures in the toy store. He will be helping us with our editing skills and will help us check over capitalization, punctuation, and spelling when writing. He will also be spending a night in your house and will bring along his diary!

In Maths this week we have been looking at counting on from any number in 5's and 10's. We are exploring addition and subtraction to 20 and reviewing doubles. The children have enjoyed working on story problems and figuring out which strategy they will use to solve the problems.

You are invited to our Yr 2C assembly this Friday, January 22, 2009. The focus of our assembly will center on our Unit of Inquiry entitled 'Reduce, Reuse, Recycle!' Children should come dressed in their P.E. Uniforms on this day. Hope to see you there!

'Our Personal Choices Affect Our Environment' is the central idea in our next unit of inquiry entitled "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle". We will be reusing and recycling materials for projects, so please send him any materials listed on the right hand side of the blog.

I would like to wish all of you a happy and prosperous New Year! Thank you for the wonderful cards and gifts given to me. I appreciate your thoughts and kindness!
We will return to our regular routines on Monday! Make sure your child has a jacket or coat to wear outside. It's a bit chilly outside and when its windy it makes it worse!