Wednesday:

We used resources from this FREE Poet Prints Teaching package. I had students read the easier version of the passage, then complete the 3-2-1 activity (record three things they learned and two questions they still have, then draw one thing that represents luck for Lunar New Year). 

We also created shadow puppets. The students loved using the projector to play with these! 

Thursday: 

As a Thankful Thursday activity, we traced our hands and wrote "I am lucky because..." Then, we combined our hand outlines into a dragon!

We also made these super simple and cute dragon puppets. 

As well, we did a writing activity. I showed the students a list of the Chinese Zodiac animals and the traits associated with each one. Then, I gave them the sentence frames "I am like the _____ because ______. Once, (detail/example)." Example: "I am like the tiger because I am brave. Once, I went to the hospital to get a shot." Some students went way above and beyond with this activity, writing pages and pages of examples about how they exemplify the traits of the various zodiac animals. It was a very high engagement activity! 

On Friday, many students had catch up to do, and our afternoon was taken up by a theater performance in the gym, so we did not have time for any further Lunar New Year activities unfortunately.

It was a fun week overall! Gung hay fat choy! 

During our first week back, students wrote personal narratives about their winter breaks. We used a graphic organizer from the writing lessons in Reading A-Z as the planning sheet. 

2. We read Makusani's Lesson from Reading A-Z and identified the words the writer used to tell the reader the SETTING.

3. I read aloud Jabari Jumps and we worked as a group to identify the problem and solution. 

4. Finally, we engaged in a story workshop process to come up with our own narratives that include a character, setting, problem, and solution! Students worked with the loose parts to set up their scene, then filled in a planning sheet, and finally recorded their stories in their journals. 

This month, we also did the personified weather (inviting readers to visualize) writing lesson from Adrienne Gear. This writing lesson connects well with the water cycle inquiry! 

Finally, we did some procedural writing by writing instructions for how to celebrate a favourite holiday! I used a planning sheet from Reading A-Z for this. On the left, you can see the modelled/shared writing that we did as an example. 

We also did some review of double-digit subtraction. We spent the week after winter break reviewing the stragies the students had previously been taught, then for the following week we did (looks around, whispers) rote practice (shhh, don't tell anyone). I gave the students who still needed a lot of practice these worksheets to do (yes, I said the W word). The students who'd already mastered the skill worked on word problems instead. 

I assessed at the end of the second week and found that most students had made great improvement. I had a few students who still needed to practice more, so I had one of our Resource teachers pull them out for a couple review sessions, and our other Resource teacher put together duotangs of extra practice for them to bring home. Those students are also now up to speed! 

We did a mini-unit on measurement in centimetres and meters using this resource. My students really enjoyed the Measure a Friend and Measure Classroom Objects activities! 

We read Every Human Has Rights: A photographic declaration for kids. Each student chose one right to copy out and illustrate, and we combined them into a class book. 

We read Where We Live: Mapping neighbourhoods of kids around the globe by Margriet Ruurs, and students worked in pairs to use Venn diagrams to compare and contrast their own lives in Richmond with those of the children profiled in the book. 

We read If the World Were a Village and students worked in pairs to create visual representations of the information in the book. This activity has great connections to math. Older students could make connections to learning about percentages, decimals, ratios, etc., and could research to find out how some of the statistics in the book have changed since it was initially published. The images at the right are the example project I created and shared with the students. 

We read I Have the Right to Culture (on Epic) and explored open-ended art centers in the classroom. Interestingly, though I offered the options of painting or using craft materials, many students just wanted to draw! This was a fun opportunity to exercise some creativity on a Friday afternoon. 

We read The Map of Good Memories, and we are creating our own maps of good memories based on this lesson from Adrienne Gear's blog. Some students' maps are still works in progress! I'd recommend allotting a lot of time for this project. While some students finished quite quickly, others needed AT LEAST three forty minute blocks to get this project done.