I don’t send agendas home with students each day. Instead, I use them as reflection books that students complete in class. 

This month, I had students record a goal at the end of the day on Tuesday that they planned to focus on for the next two days, e.g., to color neatly, to walk quietly in the hallway, to keep their cubby tidy, etc. Then, at the end of the day on Thursday, I had them draw one to three stars to show how well they did with their goal. We did this for two weeks - the other two weeks of the month were too busy. 

I worked through this geometry unit with the students. Highlights included:

• quadrilateral robots

• 3D shapes using marshmallows and toothpicks—always a hit!

• a scavenger hunt for 3D shapes on our playground

We also worked on some patterning activities. The week that we focused on patterning happened to be the week of Orange Shirt Day, which turned out to be great timing since some of our patterning activities connected to indigeneity. I’ll definitely plan the patterning unit to coincide with Orange Shirt Day again in the future! 

These are the patterning activities we did:

• We used pattern blocks to make positional patterns and identified the core.

• We searched for patterns in the hundreds chart.

• We tried out Metis finger weaving. A couple notes on this: 

  • I STRONGLY recommend having extra adults in the room for this. It was quite challenging for some of the students, and would have been very stressful if not for the three amazing parent volunteers, our resource teacher, and our EA. 

  • I bought black and red wool for the students. Next year, I plan to use orange wool instead of red to tie in with Orange Shirt Day.  

We have completed the first two pages of this booklet: This Is Me and This Is My Street. We’re working slowly through the booklet and will complete the remaining pages over the next couple months. For This Is My Street, I gave students the opportunity to show their house/building to the class by entering their address in Google Earth. They were excited to show their classmates where they live and thought it was so cool to see a picture of their home online! I do allow students to opt out of showing their home to the class if for whatever reason they prefer not to participate. 

Apart from that, these are the activities we did:

DNA 

We read the book A Family Is a Family Is a Family by Sara O’Leary (a fellow UBC grad!) and each student drew and wrote about why their family is special. 

We did two activities related to the book Shi-Shi-Etko by Nicola I. Campbell:

• Students drew and labeled the items in Shi-Shi-Etko’s memory bag. 

• We read the book for a second time and identified some of the important people in Shi-Shi-Etko’s life: her parents and grandmother. Then, students drew three important people in their own lives and wrote one sentence about each. We used the template in this resource from Infusing Indigenous Literature. 

Teaching Without Frills craftsmanship activities - I especially love the adding details to a house activity!  

Name art on index cards. This was also an opportunity to do some phonemic analysis of each of our names. For example, the name Sophia (there is no student named Sophia in my class, but it was the most popular girls’ baby name in the year my students were born), though it has six letters, has only five phonemes. Analyzing this name would offer an opportunity to discuss with students that the “o” in the name Sophia makes a long sound, that “ph” can make an /f/ sound, and that “i” in this case makes a long ee sound.

Self-portraits with goals (connects to Career)

We did this project and I had students draw their family on the circles to create family trees.

We've worked through the first few lessons in this thermal energy unit:

1. I had students colour the included cover page (this was really just to fill time at the end of one of the first few days).

2. We read Investigating Heat by Sally M. Walker (available on Epic) and filled in a web. This was very scaffolded and mostly involved me reading and thinking aloud as I identified important words, and students copying down what I wrote on the board. My main goal was for students to become familiar with the format of the graphic organizer and the idea of identifying key words in a text so that eventually they will be able to do this with greater independence.

3. We read The Energy That Warms Us: A look at heat by Jennifer Boothroyd (also on Epic). Then, each student wrote three sentences about thermal energy using the sentence starters “Thermal energy is…”, “Thermal energy can…”, and “Thermal energy has (the power to/ability to or similar)...” 

4. We read a passage from the unit linked above about thermal energy and students completed comprehension questions.

5. We did a cloze task about conduction, convection, and radiation. 

Spelling:

Last year, I was trying to run individualized spelling programs for each student in my class. It was logistically very difficult. This year, I'm just having the whole class work on the same words based on the class’s average level. This does mean that the spelling tasks are arguably too easy for some students, but that’s not the end of the world, and it’s much more feasible than what I was attempting to do last year.

To determine the class's average level, I did some assessment over the first couple days of school. First, I had the students spell the first 15 Dolch Pre-Primer words. Then, the next day, I had the students who’d scored 13/15 or higher on the first assessment spell the first 15 Dolch Primer words. (Meanwhile, the students who’d scored 12/15 or lower were doing a coloring activity with our Resource teacher.) Based on the results of those two assessments, I made a decision to have the whole class work through the Primer words using this Measured Mom resource. We are focusing on one word each day, and I'll assess students' progress every three weeks or so. 

Printing:

Our school doesn't own any Handwriting Without Tears resources (that I know of, anyway!). However, I’m familiar with the program because my previous schools used it. I had the students practice printing each upper and lowercase letter, as well as all the numerals, guiding them through the formation of each using the HWT prompts (e.g., for uppercase a, “magic c, come back up, down to bump the line”; for uppercase a, “big line down, big line down, little line across”). We worked through them in this order:

Day 1: Students printed all upper and lowercase letters and all numerals without guidance from me as a formative assessment.

Day 2: We practiced L, F, E, H, T, I (the straight line letters). I modelled the correct formation of each, then had the students print each letter seven times as I circulated the room providing feedback. We repeated this routine on subsequent days.

Day 3: U, C, O, Q, G, S, J, D, P, B, R (curved letters)

Day 4: K, A, N, M, V, W, X, Y, Z (letters with diagonal lines)

Day 5: c, o, s, v, w, t (“Just like their capitals”)

Day 6: a, g, d (“magic c letters”)

Day 7: u, i, e (remaining vowels)

Day 8: l, k, y, j (similar to their capitals)

Day 9: p (starts on the dashed line, dives down to the basement); r, n, m, h, b (letters that dive down to bump the line)

Day 10: f, q, g, z (“tricky leftovers” - q is taught here instead of as a magic c letter so that students don’t confused it with g)

Day 11: numerals 

Writing: 

I had students write about what they did over the summer as a formative assessment. Apart from that, I haven’t done much writing instruction, but rest assured that writing will be a major focus for the remainder of the year once our routines are in place.

Daily 5:

I taught the Daily 5 foundation lessons as outlined in the book by Boushey & Moser and we worked on building stamina. I don’t do listen to reading as we don’t have equipment for this, and I don’t do word work as this will take place during guided small groups (which we’ll start right after Thanksgiving at the latest), so it’s really more like Daily 3.