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!