Week 2: Getting into our routines

This morning was our first Monday of the school year so we had a chance to try out some of our Monday routines that will happen all year. The first part of that routine is journals. Each Monday we will start the day by writing about our weekends. To make the job easier, it is always a great idea to have a conversation on the way to school about the weekend so that our ideas are fresh in our minds.

After recess we started another routine: book time. During book time we have a chance to look at books by ourselves and we work hard to build our reading stamina. For the grade 1's we talked about doing a word hunt for any small words you know and then using the pictures to tell the story. This means that we can "read" books even if we can't quite read all the words yet. For the grade 2's who are ready for chapter books they are invited to choose a book from our classroom library or may bring a book from home if they would like.

Then we had math. We created bar graphs to show the information we gathered in our hobby surveys last week. We made sure our graphs had labels, a title, and accurate towers that matched the information we gathered.

This afternoon we started with finish up time. This is the time for us to make sure our journals are completely finished and to finish any other work that we didn't finish last week. If we have all of our work finished we get to have some free time. Then it was time for gym. Our gym time is at 1:30 this year.

After gym we worked on our portraits. The goal for today was to finish our shirts and then start working on our hair if we had time. We used yarn, pipe cleaners, raffia, easter grass, and foam strips for our hair.

At the end of the day we talked about our classroom jobs. These are jobs we do at the end of the day to make sure our classroom is clean and ready for tomorrow. Each table group is in charge of one job. The jobs are: floors, desks, games carpet, supplies, and library.

Here is an important message from Mrs. Armour and Mrs. Saunders about running club:

Run Club is back! Starting this Wednesday, September 12th Mrs. Saunders and Mrs. Armour and any students between grade 1 - 6 are welcome to sign up. We will be running every Wednesday around the "Terry Fox loop" (one km). We will try and increase our stamina each week to get ready for the Terry Fox whole school run on Friday, September 28th. We will meet between 12:00-12:10 at the picnic tables with our lunches (time to go to the washroom and get a drink) to sign in and start running. We will eat together AFTER we run. We will stop running by 12:40 to make sure everyone has a chance to eat and cool down before the bell. Recording our laps will be a fun motivator to see how far we can run altogether.

Let's go run!