Our Positive Digital Footprints

As part of our current religion focus into digital citizenship, we continue to have conversations on the importance of being positive digital citizens. Last week we had a conversation about the many different digital platforms we use at home and at school. We made a list and discovered that there are many platforms that students use in common and some that only a few of us use. The most important message we agreed upon was the importance of making a positive digital footprint. Students wrote about how they will make sure they are making positive and safe choices on the digital platforms they use most. This was our first time using the green screen this year and our first time practicing our reading fluency. Students have an important message to share about their social media use. We hope they inspire others to make better choices when they post, share or connect with others online.

 

Students watched the video today and reflected on their writing and their reading fluency. They had a lot of great suggestions for what they want to change for next time. Have a read at our goals for next time we made on Twitter:

Read to Someone

We are slowly getting comfortable with each of our Literacy Centers. Students have been practising what they can do at their centers independently to practice their reading, writing and vocabulary skills. We will soon be doing our centers daily to practice many concepts that we learn on our own or with a small group. The goal of our Literacy Centers is to have students work collaboratively or independently at centers to practice key concepts in fun and engaging ways.

This week we practiced another center called Read to Someone. We made an "I-Can" checklist as a class to discuss what the rules are for the center. One of the goals that I'd like students to work on is their reading fluency. We practiced this by reading together with a partner and self-evaluating how we did. We had to rate our accuracy, rate, expression and punctuation. A goal for each student is to understand that when we pause during our reading, we need to put a punctuation mark to end our sentence. Students practiced this with their partners while reading their descriptive paragraphs. They did a wonderful job of evaluating how they did. We will keep this evaluation at our center and students can refer to it when reading with a partner at their centers. Ask your child about the new Read to Someone center!

Pumpkin Investigations!

Adjectives to describe the inside and outside of a pumpkin

In Science, we continue to explore, wonder and learn all about pumpkins. This week students got the opportunity to really explore all about pumpkins when we did a pumpkin investigation. Students worked in groups to describe their pumpkin both inside and out. We used adjectives to come up with how we could describe the pumpkins. We also made predictions about the features of our pumpkin including how many lines it had and how many seeds.

Students had the chance to consolidate their learning from our pumpkin investigation and post their new learning on our KWL Chart for pumpkins. We know a lot more about pumpkins now. Investigating the pumpkins and reading stories has really helped our learning in science! 

Our current KWL Chart for pumpkins in science!

Using what we learned from Math, students had to come up with their own counting strategies to determine how many seeds they had inside of their pumpkins. We are consolidating our findings and learning more about how to skip count large numbers. So far we know that we can count by 1's, 2's, 5's 10's and even 25's. We will be practicing this skill for the next while.

Understanding how to find patterns in numbers helps us to see numbers in a variety of ways. We can use our strategies to help us count and sort big object (like boxes, desks or chairs) as well as little objects (like pumpkin seeds, coins or toothpicks). Students are encouraged to practice what they recall about finding patterns in numbers at home!

Below is a video of our pumpkin investigation fun. We used the Flipagram app for the first time. What a fun app to capture our pumpkin learning!


 

Self+Peer Assessment and Retelling

Our reading focus continues to be focusing on the important details when retelling. We are focus on the important details when we learn about retelling to help us write recounts as well. Students are focusing on only the important details when we read and retell stories both orally and when writing.


We are focusing on peer-to-peer assessment. Students are getting the opportunity to be "teachers". They are referring to the Retell success criteria checklist to see if students are including all parts of a retell. They are also looking for capital letters, finger spaces and punctuation. Good writers use a checklist to keep on track. As little teachers, we are using post-its to helps our friends edit their work. Excellent job grade 2!!
We also continue to self-assess our work. We continue to refer to the checklist to help keep us on track. We also tested out a new app called Dragon Dictation. This app allows us to read and then the words that appear on the screen. Students got the chance to re-read and check to see if they spelled their words correctly.
Another way we are assessing our understanding is through Twitter. This week we introduced a new part of our class called Book Talk. During Book Talk, we sit in a small group and talk about the books that we read. We are answering questions to extend our understanding. Students are also looking on Twitter on the iPads for a Book Talk question asked by me, and they are replying with answers to the questions. Have a read at some of our Book Talk Tweets below.

We also included some Book Talk AudioBoo responses. Have a listen to some retells so far:

FF: https://audioboo.fm/boos/1957079-ff-retells-the-very-hungry-bear

PE: https://audioboo.fm/boos/1957149-pe-retella-the-hungry-bear

HH: https://audioboo.fm/boos/1957057-hh-retells-hungry-bear

Student Voice in our Classroom

Capturing evidence of student voice is a goal for our class this year. We are trying many strategies and ensuring that each day students in our class get to share their thinking or ideas in a variety of ways.

Each day that we do our literacy centers, students get an opportunity to share what they've learned. This is an opportunity for students to read or demonstrate a new strategy that they want to share with the class. The 2 girls worked at the word wall center today. They were using the magnet letters to make some of our word wall words directly on the Word Wall board. What a great idea. They were excited to share it with the class. Way to go girls!

Also in our literacy centers, we are working on a new reading program on the Chromebooks called Literably. Students log into our class Literably account and can practice assessing their own reading fluency by recording themselves reading the stories. After reading, they look at a checklist and assess what they want to work on next. Students are really enjoying this new reading program. Ask your child how they use Literably to listen and assess their reading!

Finally in Math, we are working on 2D shapes. Today we talked about the various features of different shapes like their sides, their lines and their corners. Today we learned that corners is another word for vertices. We also tweeted some new learning.

Another way we are capturing student voice in our classroom is through Twitter. Students are excited about using Twitter to share our learning and thinking. After our math lesson today, we talked about what we learned. We used Twitter to share our new learning about 2D shapes. Have a read at what we tweeted today:

Landscapes and Reading Fluency

In Art today we started working on landscapes. We are thinking about winter pictures and winter landscapes. We sang a song about landscapes and talked about what background, middleground and foreground mean. 

Today we started with the  back part of our landscapes. We used white, dark blue and light blue to create the back part of our landscape photos. 

Next time we will focus on creating the background, middleground and foreground using winter pictures. Ask your child to explain what those art terms means!

Using the AudioBoo iPad app to self-assess our reading fluency.

One strategy we are working on in class is to self-assess our reading fluency. We are trying this with our partners in our literacy centers when we read with someone. We also work on this when reading by ourselves during literacy centers time. We used the AudioBoo app to record ourselves while we read. We listen to the recording and follow the text to see if we read too fast or too slow, to see how we can read unfamiliar words and also to recognize if we've missed any words when reading. Students enjoy this strategy. It is teaching them how to self-assess their own reading while working on their Raz reading. 

AO: https://audioboo.fm/boos/1841110-ao-reading-on-raz

FF: https://audioboo.fm/boos/1841127-ff-reading-on-raz