Monday November 30, 2020

Happy Monday November 30!

Reminders:

-Beddington Heights is participating in the Mayor's Annual Food Drive this year!  Please bring in any nonperishable food items for the Calgary Food Bank!  Also, we are collecting monetary donations. This will be a great act of kindness and show a great deal of care for others during a trying time of year for those who are less fortunate.  The drive ends Dec 11th.  Thank you for your support on this!

No School Friday Dec 4 (PD DAY)

Winter Break starts December 18th! Only 3 weeks!

The first week back from school we will be doing online learning (Jan 4-11) I have given parents their log ins in a private email earlier in October. I will be helping the students practice logging in tomorrow and Wednesday. If you are having problems logging in at home please email or call me and I can help you with logging in. 

Today in room 5:

We began our day with some catch up and reading time. Some students were working on finishing their urban and rural pictures while others read their books! I took in their books today so they can have new library books tomorrow. 

After our morning meeting the students had music with Mr Wiens.

During our snack time we finished off the tenth chapter of Charlotte's Web. Students are loving the book and the detailed pictures that come with it!

After our time on the playground during recess we moved into our monthly writing prompt. Each month I like to see what the students can do with just a picture. Our photo today was a winter scene with students playing in the snow, building snow men, having snow ball fights and sledding. We brainstormed what we saw and some ideas we could write about. Together we created some sentence starters to use alongside our brainstormed ideas. I gave everyone about 40 mins to write before we headed out for lunch. 

When we finished lunch we did a much needed desk clean before heading to gym. 

This week in gym we are doing a mix of activities. Today was throwing drills and jumping jack dodgeball. In this game if you get hit you have to do 5 jumping jacks. You are never out! Face shots do not count! Tomorrow will be scooter games. Wednesday we have holiday themed dodgeball with Mr Sadowsky. Thursday we are doing scoops and balls games. 

After gym we moved into health! Today we learned about the Zones of Regulation! Below are my slides I used to help the students learn about the zones. Feel free to use them at home :)

We finish our day with some domino single digit addition. Right now I am working to increase the students confidence and understanding with adding single digits. We did this today by adding using dominoes. 

First we added the dots on either side of one domino. Students had to use the proper number and + and = when building the question.

Second we used to dominos and the students had to add up all the dots on the top and bottom of the domino before adding them together!

Students used a white board to help set up the question and solve the domino math!

That is all for today! 

Have a great day everyone!

Mr Lancee 

:)

Friday Nov 27, 2020

Happy Friday Nov 27, 2020!

HAPPY HAPPY HAPPY FRIDAY VIDEO! 

Reminders:

-Beddington Heights is participating in the Mayor's Annual Food Drive this year!  Please bring in any nonperishable food items for the Calgary Food Bank!  Also, we are collecting monetary donations. This will be a great act of kindness and show a great deal of care for others during a trying time of year for those who are less fortunate.  The drive ends Dec 11th.  Thank you for your support on this!

Today in room 5:

We began our day with some time to finish a couple things we worked on this week! These were:

-Create your own creature journals

-Grain elevator art

-Work on urban elements of Saskatoon pictures

With our creature journals finished I will be editing their work so that we can use computers or ipads next week to write their good copies digitally!

After some catch up time we moved into our morning routine to cover calendar, days of the week, months of the year, seasons, number of days in school, skip counting by 2's from 100 to 0 and finally weather!

We then transitioned into printing and worked on writing the letter M. We talked about the sound it makes, how to write it lower and upper case, words that start with M and a sentence that used wow words and a word that starts with M!

After our snack we moved outside to play some tag games on the field. Today we played Minecraft tag and had different student playing different creatures. These different Minecraft creatures were would cause you to do 5 jumping jacks or crouch on the ground until you were saved. 

When we returned to class we had some time to finish our urban Saskatoon pictures. We used different videos and pictures to see what we noticed about the urban (city) elements of Saskatoon. Students noticed buildings, trees, roads, cars, houses, apartment buildings, and bridges. Today we focused on the rural elements of Saskatoon. Students noticed fences, rivers, farm fields, barns, tractors, oil rigs, grain elevators and farm animals. We spent some time creating different pictures to post up on our mural located in the hall way outside room 5!

Room 5 finished off their day with some time on Mathletics. I have sent out a few more assignments relating to addition as this is the new unit we started yesterday!

Have a wonderful weekend everyone :)

Stay safe!

Mr Lancee

Wednesday Nov 25, 2020

 Happy Wednesday November 25, 2020

Reminders:

-Beddington Heights is participating in the Mayor's Annual Food Drive this year!  Please bring in any nonperishable food items for the Calgary Food Bank!  Also, we are collecting monetary donations. This will be a great act of kindness and show a great deal of care for others during a trying time of year for those who are less fortunate.  The drive ends Dec 11th.  Thank you for your support on this!

School photos have arrived! However...I forgot to send them home...but they will be sent tomorrow!Today in room 5:

We began our day with some quiet catch up and reading time! I introduced the students to some new friends that we will use each day. Introducing... the quiet critters! These little critters love being at students desks. But only if they are working quietly. I will bring them out during morning, writing and reading times to help students with their noise level and have a friend at their desk :)

For LA today we began the third part of our create your own insect project. Yesterday we filled in our planning sheets answering the four questions I shared on Monday's blog. Today we worked as a class to create sentence starters that we could use with our ideas collected in our planning sheet. We will continue our work on the journals tomorrow!

In the afternoon we continued working on our journal before heading to gym for some 5 on 5 games of basketball! Today is unfortunately our last day of basketball as tomorrow Mr Sadowsky is teaching hockey and Friday we will be outside.

Upon returning to class the students began working on their grain elevator art projects! Yesterday we started the project by learning about what happens to the Saskatoons natural resource, grains! We learned how they are harvested, taken to grain elevators to be weighed and then shipped to companies who use it for different products. Yesterday we drew the grain elevators on the prairie landscape. Today we used black marker to outline the pencil from the previous day. We also used oil pastels to create bold pattern lines on the grain elevators, landscape and sky. The art will be displayed in our room until winter break!

We finished off our day by playing a game as a class. We used a random number spinner generate a number and wrote it on our sheet. Our first task was to write the 5 numbers that came before our random number. We extended this by having the students write the 5 numbers that came before the given number but if we counted by 2's and 5's! It was  a great activity to explore our hundreds charts with and practice   counting backwards!

Have a great day everyone!

Stay safe :)

Mr Lancee

Monday Nov 23, 2020

Happy Monday November 23!

Reminders:

-Beddington Heights is participating in the Mayor's Annual Food Drive this year!  Please bring in any nonperishable food items for the Calgary Food Bank!  Also, we are collecting monetary donations. This will be a great act of kindness and show a great deal of care for others during a trying time of year for those who are less fortunate.  The drive starts today and ends Dec 11th.  Thank you for your support on this!

Today in room 5:

We began our day with some greetings after the long weekend before having some time to read. As students are growing as readers they are becoming more engaged in their reading time!

After gym with Mr Sadowsky we went through our morning routine practicing days of the week, months, weather, number of the day. We have begun practicing counting backwards! Students often find this trickier, especially with the twos! 

We read another chapter of Charlottes Web today during snack. We are approaching the halfway point in the book! Once we reach halfway point we will be a project to talk about what we have read so far!

After recess we moved into our new science project! Students are creating their own small crawling flying creature using what they learned in this unit. The creatures have to be able to exist in our world right now. No 100 ft tall fire breathing bumble bees allowed! After watching some videos to get our brains thinking about what kind of creature we wanted to make we all were were tasked with drawing and naming our creature.

While creating their creature they had to think about....

How will your creature move?

What will it eat?

Where does it live?

How does it defend itself?

After lunch we moved into word work with our new wow words. The wow words this week are:

girl

will

have

ball

make

Today we wrote them in pencil, rainbow and favourite color form. Once students were finished they looked the words up in books to see how they can be used in sentences.

After word work we began creating our new social studies classroom mural! This mural is going to show Saskatoon and the surrounding area of the prairies! We used sponges and paint to cover a large sheet of paper in yellow, green and blue. We will add to the mural over the next few weeks. 

We finished off our day with some math. Today we focused on comparing numbers as greater or less than another number. Students filled in two worksheets that had them using < > = to compare the numbers. We of course listened to the number gator song before starting our work!

Number gator song

That's all for today everyone!

Have a great evening :)

Stay safe!

Mr Lancee

Wednesday November 18, 2020

 Happy Wednesday November 18!

Reminders:

Student led conference tomorrow (Thursday) from 3:30-7:30 pm and Friday from 8:00 am -1:00 pm. The interviews are all online this year so please make sure you log in to book an interview slot. The link will be sent to you for Microsoft teams. You do not need to download the app! It can be viewed through the browser as well :)

If you are having trouble booking please let me know so I can book you in! 

Today in room 5:

Students began their day with some time to finish their journals, natural resources sheet, and read to self. This gave me some time to read and work with students on sight words and their reading.

After our calendar the students had music with Mr Wiens! Make sure you check out his blog to see what is happening in music!

Upon returning from snack and recess on the playground we moved into some Social Studies. Continuing the lesson from the previous day, we focused on the natural resources found in Saskatoon and the surrounding prairie community. Together we explored oil, animals such as cows, water and crops such as grains. 

The video below was just one we used to learn about the natural resources! 

Oil

In the afternoon we had a visit from our assistant principal, Ms Austin. She came by to take a survey with the students that informs the school of how students are feeling about the current school year. Questions such as do they feel safe, feel like they have someone to talk to, enjoy coming to school everyday were among a few of thew questions they answered. The survey was anonymous and no personal info was provided.

We finished off our day with some time on Mathletics and Razkids before cleaning up atg the end of the day! 

Have a great evening everyone :)

Mr Lancee

Tuesday Nov 17, 2020

Happy Tuesday November 17!

Reminders:

Student led conference this coming Thursday from 3:30-7:30 pm and Friday from 8:00 am -1:00 pm. The interviews are all online this year so please make sure you log in to book an interview slot. The link will be sent to you for Microsoft teams. You do not need to download the app! It can be viewed through the browser as well :)

If you are having trouble booking please let me know so I can book you in! Both Thursday and Friday still have several spaces open!

Today in room 5:

IRIS

Today I worked with students to come up with their personal, literacy and math goals for conferences this coming week! We will review them together during the scheduled bookings :)

ELA:

Students began their day with some extra time to finish their journalling from yesterday. The students were very excited for my birthday and so I made the journalling prompt all about what they think I did. The students enjoyed predicting everything from a trip to the mountains to going to McDonalds for dinner!

We also were introduced to our new wow words for this week:

jump

little

went

has

here

We did rainbow writing, pyramid words and treasure hunt to practice writing our wow words.

Math:

In math today we continued the lesson from yesterdays math class. 

We went over how to solve math puzzle pieces using a 50's grid. 

The puzzle piece looked like it was cut out of the 50's grid with only one number showing in the grid. Students had to use their grid to find the missing numbers for each piece. It was a bit tricky to start but after some practice the students began to see the patterns.

Social:

Students learned all about natural resources! This is the foundation for learning about the natural resources that are found and used within other communities across Canada. 

Watch the video to learn about Natural Resources with room 5 :)

Tomorrow we will look into the specific natural resources that can be found within the prairies and Saskatoon. 

Phys Ed:

Students had phys ed with Mr Sadowsky today! They were in the gym playing small games of floor hockey.

Have a great evening!

Looking forward to seeing everyone virtually for conferences!

Mr Lancee

Friday November 13, 2020

Happy Friday Nov 13, 2020!

Reminders: 

Parent teacher interviews November 19 (3:30-7:30) & November 20 (8:00-1:00)

Today in room 5:

Today we began our day with a quick desk clean before starting some reading. Students had several things from the week to put away and garbage to dispose of.

After our morning meeting  we moved straight into science!

We have begun a new class experiment in which we are going to be watching the life cycle of mealworms!

Today we looked online at the first stage of a meal worms life cycle: The egg. Students first noticed that the eggs are small, white, oval shapes that are much smaller then animal eggs. We drew and labeled the eggs and answered the I notice and I wonder parts of the sheet found below.

After discussing the eggs I showed the students our class container that held 250 meal worms!

Here they are:

Look close and you can see them!

After science we had snack before heading off to gym with Mr Sadowsky.

Today we had our first basic facts quiz!

We will be starting this unit in the next couple weeks. Today was just a snapshot to see where our students are sitting right now. 

Below are some example of some of the basic facts we will be doing.

Upon completing our basic facts tests I gave students time to do some razkids and mathletics on ipads.

Please check your assignments over the weekend to complete some extra math tasks :)

Thats all from me!

Happy Friday and have a wonderful weekend!

Mr Lancee

Tuesday Nov 10, 2020

Happy Tuesday Nov 10, 2020

Reminders: 

Please wear your poppies all this week

No School November 11 (Remembrance Day)

Picture retakes November 12 

Parent teacher interviews November 19 (3:30-7:30) & November 20 (8:00-1:00)

Basic facts quiz Friday

BHS is participating the Mayor's Annual Christmas Food Drive!  It will be beginning Nov 24th and run till Dec 11th.  We will have a donations box setup too. 

Please try to help those in need by bringing in any nonperishable food items or a monetary donation.   Thank you for instilling the value of caring for others with your children and families during this holiday season. 

Today in room 5:

Today Beddington had it's Remembrance Day assembly (in class) and activities. 

Alongside making our wreath yesterday (seen below) we talked about Remembrance Day and what it means to us. 

Mr Beechey and the teachers of BHS put together a wonderful video assembly which showcased:

-The reading of the Flanders Field poem

-Recognition for Indigenous Veterans Day

-Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Art

-A reading of The Eleventh Hour

-Mr Weins playing The last post on trumpet

-A moment of silence 

-Oh Canada

-A message from Mr Hebert

It was a beautiful assembly for the students to experience. 

In the afternoon we did the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier art project. 

Students looked at different tombs that have been created around the world to remember soldiers that never had a proper burial. 

We looked at the symbolism of different symbols such as helmets, poppies, swords, soldiers, and doves. We then used these symbols to create our own tombs of the unknown soldiers.

Hope everyone has a wonderful day and takes time to remember on Remembrance Day tomorrow.

Mr Lancee

Monday Nov. 9 2020

Happy Monday November 9, 2020!

Reminders: 

Please wear your poppies all this week

Remembrance Day within classrooms assembly Nov 10 (Tomorrow)

No School November 11 (Remembrance Day)

Picture retakes November 12 (I have the pictures ready to send home Monday!)

Parent teacher interviews November 19 (3:30-7:30) & November 20 (8:00-1:00)

Basic facts quiz Friday

Hello and welcome to a brand new week! I hope everyone had a wonderful weekend and managed to not get blown away by the wind!  💨😱

We began our day with students having some time to read their library books and book boxes before starting our morning calendar. 

Below is a our morning calendar so you can use to see what we accomplished in our morning routine!

Can you skip count by 2, 5, and 10 to 100??

See if you can fill in our number of the day chart!

After calendar we moved into word work! 

For word work today I showed the students our new WOW Words!

The wow words this week are:

is

see

come

get

at

I then gave every student their brand new personal dictionaries! We will be using this tool in class every time we write. We went through all of the pages today and highlighted our wow words from the previous weeks.

After snack and recess we moved into writing. Every Monday we journal! Today our journalling topic was: What is your favourite food?

We used this book as our starting point.

Dragons Love Tacos

The question I proposed to students was, "Is there a food that you love as much as dragons love tacos?"

after brainstorming our favourite foods students used sentence starters and dictionaries to help write in their journals.

After lunch we continued to work on our writing for a short period before playing basketball in the gym.

Upon returning from gym we made poppies for our Remembrance Day wreath! I showed students step by step how to make the actual poppies. We then cut out tracings of our hands on green paper to make the backing for our wreath. If you would like to learn how to draw a poppy check out this cool Art hub for kids video.

We finished our day with playing a place value math game. 

Students used dice to roll a double digit number.

We then wrote the number in the write it number section.

Students used place value ones and tens blocks to build the number.

Finally they had to draw the place value blocks.

Each time they got the number correct they earned one point! 

The highest score in the 20 minutes we played was 8!

This game can be found below:

Thats it, that's all folks!

Have a great evening.

Mr Lancee

Friday Nov 6, 2020

Happy Friday November 4, 2020!

Reminders: 

Please wear your poppies all next week

Remembrance Day within classrooms assembly Nov 10 

No School November 11 (Remembrance Day)

Picture retakes November 12 (I have the pictures ready to send home Monday!)

Parent teacher interviews November 19 (3:30-7:30) & November 20 (8:00-1:00)

Basic facts quiz bumped to next week!

Happy Happy Happy Friday!

Today students began their day with some quiet reading time with their new library books! I asked the students their interests in reading and had our librarian Mrs. P bring them new books. Students were ecstatic to be able to read books about cats, animals, sharks, Dogman, Pokemon and Pete the Cat.

After our morning calendar we went outside to play some Minecraft themed phys ed. games.

When students finished snack we transitioned into printing and letter sounds. Today we focused on the vowel O. The Letter O

We learned that the letter O can make many different sounds! 

O can be long: Ocean, No.

O can be short: Otter, Octopus.

O can also make some other sounds when combined with other letters such as do!

Students then brainstormed different O words and practiced printing the letter in lower and upper case.

Our last part of the lesson focused on using this weeks wow words with a letter O word in a sentence. 

Printing days I do care more about spelling! We came up with some silly sentences such as, "My Mom looks like a parrot!"

After printing and letters we did a desk clean to organize our desks for the upcoming week.

Once students finished cleaning their desks we moved into Mathletics on ipads. I have assigned several assignments to students that I recommend be worked on at home for extra practice! Every little bit of practice helps :)

Have a great weekend everyone! 

Mr Lancee

Wednesday November 4, 2020

 Happy Wednesday November 4, 2020

Reminders: 

Please return student pictures by Nov 6! (Sent home today)

No School November 11 (Remembrance Day)

Picture retakes November 12 (I have the pictures ready to send home Monday!)

Parent teacher interviews November 19 (3:30-7:30) & November 20 (8:00-1:00)

Today in room 5:

We began our day with our usual catch up and reading time. Students worked hard to finish their number 8 printing and representation before having some time to read their favourite stories.

After catch up and reading students went off to the gym for some floor hockey with Mr Sadowsky!

After gym we moved into our calendar routine. Each day I have a student read our morning message to the class. This helps them to develop their confidence with reading aloud. It is of course a voluntary part of the morning routine and students always enjoy giving it a try! Students also loved to fill in the number of the day sheet and the weather chart which graphs the weather in Calgary.

We then had snack and recess before heading inside for our word work time. Using our wow words we looked at how we can switch the initial sound of word to create a rhyme. Learning to rhyme words helps students to massively grow their list of sight words. We looked at the word "Look" and saw that it can become....book, shook, took, hook, and cook just to name a few!

After lunch, students had a go noodle body break before we started our math lesson. The center of our math focus today was odd and even! To help us learn about this concept we read Even Steven and Odd Todd. As a class we reviewed the specific numbers that make an odd or even.

We practiced this new concept with a sorting activity! This can be found below :)

After math we moved into science and continued to explore spiders. The goal of today was to learn about ways different invertebrates hunt/catch prey. We watched the Magic School Bus Spins a Web and talked about what we learned as a class. It was great for students to see that creatures of the same species have several ways of hunting and catching their food!

We finished off our day with a flight on AirClassroom to Saskatoon! Yes, you heard me correctly... We flew to another prairie province today! I printed out tickets for the students to have before we boarded our flight. We went over the safety protocols of flying before taking off and making observations of the landscape and landforms that can be seen around Saskatchewan. Students loved bringing imagination and some experiential learning into the classroom. We will finish our observations during catch up time tomorrow morning.

The video and tickets can be found below!

Flight video

Students were very happy to make it home after their flight in time for dismissal :)

Have a great day everyone!

Mr Lancee

Monday Nov 2, 2020

Happy Monday Nov 2, 2020

Reminders: 

Please return student pictures by Nov 6! (Sent home today)

No School November 11 (Remembrance Day)

Picture retakes November 12 (I have the pictures ready to send home Monday!)

Parent teacher interviews November 19 (3:30-7:30) & November 20 (8:00-1:00)

This week in room 5:

Math: Place value with place value blocks, skip counting, graphing the weather, basic facts quiz Friday.

Science: Habitats of spiders, comparing spiders with bees.

Social: Landmarks of Calgary, Looking at mapping where Saskatoon is, planning a trip to Saskatoon (new unit: Prairie communities), Flying to Saskatoon (in class, no trip to the airport needed :)

ELA: Wow words, star student, reading books of choice, Razkids, Letter A printing

Health: Size of the Problem (How much should we react)

Wow Words this week:

mom 

the 

he 

and 

look

Today in room 5:

ELA

-Today the students were introduced to their new wow words! These can found above :) Please practice reading them at home and they are great connecting words in sentences. 

-Students did a journal entry today writing all about their weekend. This past weekend was busy so we had several ideas to brainstorm. We reviewed the important parts of journaling such as finger spaces, capitals, periods, and starting to sound out words. I am pleased to see how much students are pushing themselves to try and sound out words!

-We began our morning with some time for students to read their books at their desks. I will be taking down some of their interests tomorrow so our librarian can get us books from the library!

Math

-Today students had math in the morning and afternoon. The morning math had students breaking down the number of the day. The number of the day was 39! We used the sheet below to look at the number represented as tallies, place value, expanded, and ten frames. Feel free to print this sheet out and try it at home!

-For the math in the afternoon we used number lines to skip count with 2's and 5's. Students often find these numbers the trickiest to skip count with. The trick is to learn the pattern to make it a little easier! This sheet can be seen below.

Social

-For social today we looked at landmarks. We learned about the landmarks we see around Calgary such as the Calgary tower, Nose Hill Park, and the Peace Bridge. We will compare our landmarks with the upcoming communities we will learn about this week!

Have a great evening everyone!

Mr Lancee