Edgemont school will be having our Terry Fox Run this Wednesday, September 30 in the afternoon during school hours. Each student should wear comfortable clothes to school and have runners or sneakers on their feet. Students will be walking and running for one hour around the school grounds in honour of Terry Fox, whose legacy has raised over $500,000,000 to find a cure for cancer.
Students and families can also support raising funds that will be donated to the Terry Fox Foundation this week. Each classroom is accepting any change or coins you may want to donate. As well, we are having a book sale at school. Families, students and staff have graciously donated books to Edgemont School that are being resold, with all the money being donated to the Terry Fox Foundation. Hardcover books are $1.00 each, and soft cover and chapter books (novels) are 50 cents each. We realize that not all families will be able to participate in raising funds but each student can participate in the run and learn about Terry Fox. Thank you for your support! Someone stole bees and honey!
Someone stole 600,000 bees and 12 hives from the Nixon Bee Farm in Innisfail, Alberta, a town just north of Calgary. The bee farmers lost $10,000 when their bees and hives were stolen. Kevin Nixon, the bee farmer, has lost his trust in their community because their bees and hives were stolen. Grade 2 students talked about and wrote down their ideas in groups answering these questions: 1. Why would someone would steal beehives? 2. Who would be effected? and why? Parents, please ask your child about her or his answers to these questions. Solutions For Bee Keepers: We talked about how the bees could be kept more safely by their owners. One suggestion we have for safety is buying video cameras. They could also set up traps around the beehives to scare people away. As well, a spiky metal high fence could be built around the beehives to protect them. Always making sure the fence has gaps so the bees can get through but the people can't. Feel free to follow the link below to watch the video about the Innisfail bee theft. Innisfail Bee Theft Video In grade two we are learning to broaden our vocabulary, meaning we want to learn how to read, write and understand new words. The words that we will learn about will be connected to the classroom curriculum, or will be commonly used English words that each student should know.
Every two weeks a new list of words will be posted on our classroom wall and we will explore them in order to better understand them. These will be added to our personal dictionaries, a book found in each student's desk called Words, Words, Words. As well, we will learn to recognize them in texts we read, learn how to pronounce them, and learn how to spell them in our writing. For September 21 to October 2 our Words to Know are based on our theme of community, insects, and common English words. They are:
We will also have an Extra Big Word that will challenge students. Each child will do their best to identify this word, try to use it verbally and in their written work. Working with this word will come with teacher and staff support as students are not expected to know it independently.
As parents you may want to know how to support this work at home. When you talk with your child about their day, listen for the proper use of these words, encourage them to ask questions about words that may be confusing, and practice placing these words in sentences, verbally or in writing. If you have any other ideas that you may want to use at home to support the expansion of your child's vocabulary, email me these ideas and I will post these suggestions on our blog. Thank you for your support and let's keep learning! One of our science explorations this year will be to learn about small animals that crawl and fly. This includes, but is not limited to, insects, arachnids, worms, snakes, and other animals. To introduce the topic we have been searching through text based materials to learn facts about insects, and have have been classifying what we have learned. Recently we also watched this Bill Nye the Science Guy video. The students asked that a link be posted on our blog so they could view the video again. After we learned about the different parts of the insect, we tried to draw a common insect, the ant. Using the website Art for Kids Hub, we were able to each draw and shade our own ant, and scientifically label them. Students asked if the video could be posted here so that they could practice their art skills. Enjoy! Our school question this year is: How Are We Connected? Throughout the year we will be talking about how each person in our Edgemont school community is connected to each other. No matter our age, our work in the school, or our abilities we are all connected to each other. We will also be asking this question to understand how the Edgemont school community is connected to our city, province, and country, as well as living and non-living things. In Room 5 we started thinking about how we are all connected by asking the question, what do we have in common? We each made a list of the things that we liked. After we finished our lists, we talked with other students and documented our common interests. Each student took this information and wrote it on a two-sided arrow, adding information such as, "we both like reading", or "we both like bicycle riding." After our two-sided arrows were completed, we attached them to a bulletin board. With the name of each student on green paper around the bulletin board, we used string to connect two names together, then added the arrows on the string pointing to each child. These arrows tell the observer what these two people have in common. As you can see from the picture below, we were able to identify many things that we have in common. We encourage you to talk about what you have in common with the people in your home, including students in our class. When we share what we like with each other, we will understand each other and feel more connected. Happy sharing! This year as our reading skills develop we want to make sure that we are using helpful strategies to improve how we read and our understanding of what we read. These are called our reading strategies, the tips and tricks we can use to improve our reading and comprehension. The reading strategies we have posted in our classroom are in the photograph below: Some children use these strategies automatically while other students need to be reminded to use them while reading a book, magazine, text online, or any other text. These reading strategies include: 1. Point to each word. 2. Sound out each word. 3. Think about what makes sense. 4. Look at the pictures for hints about the text. 5. Does it look like a word you know? 6. Skip the word you don't know. Read no for clues. Then re-read the sentence. 7. Look and listen for word patterns. 8. Does it sound right? 9. Look at the pictures and the first letter or letters. 10. Look for words you know. We have talked about these in detail in class and suggest that you have a conversation with your child about the strategies they already use, and the strategies that they could begin to use to improve their reading. Some advanced readers may only use a few of these strategies while those continuing to develop their reading may use more. Enjoy your reading! What a great start to the new school year!
Our class has been learning about each other and working together for two weeks so far this year. We're continuing with the great learning experiences that our students began in grade 1. Our theme this school year is Community. We are all members of many communities and as members, we have a unique opportunity and resposibility to improve our communities. For the first two weeks we discussed and shared our ideas about community and how we are connected to each other. We want the students to identify the different connections we have within our classroom and our school. We look forward to learning about other communities across Canada in the weeks to come. |
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June 2017
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