Diwali is an important celebration for many students in my class. One student's mother generously took the time to share with the class about the meaning behind this holiday. We also engaged in some Diwali activities throughout the day at school:

1. We made paper lanterns using this template. This was a perfect meditative activity for the morning of November 1, when most students were exhaused after trick-or-treating the night before.

2. We made paper plate rangolis. This connects to the concept of circular patterning, which is part of the BC Grade 2 math curriculum. 

3. We read through these free slides and filled in the accompanying concept web. 

4. We read the book Diwali in My New Home by Shachi Kaushik (available on Epic) and made text-to-self connections. 

This was such a fun celebration! I learned just as much as the students did! 

Our class recited "In Flanders Fields" in the school assembly. Each student had their own line to say.

We also wrote about what peace means to us. 

As well, we did this art project from Mme Marissa (originally from K&C Love Grade 3). They turned out nicely, and the students enjoyed the project. However, it was time-consuming to prep (cutting the tin foil, newspaper, and tissue paper took quite a while), and I'm not sure that there was that much actual art skill learning/practice involved. I'd be open to doing this project again but would also consider other options for future years. 

We had fun learning all about this book by Metis author Dallas Hunt!

I used this resource from Infusing Indigenous Literature.  Students drew pictures of the beginning, middle, and end of the story. They also created maps of Awasis's journey. As well, we did a coding activity - this was a bit out of my comfort zone, and it was interesting to see how some students seemed to really have a natural aptitude for and interest in this skill. 

The biggest highlight was meeting Dallas Hunt over Zoom and baking our own bannock! 

We continued with our spelling and bird group (small reading group) routines as detailed in my October post. 

I have also started a "Thankful Thursday" routine - some Thursdays, the students complete gratitude reflections. This has been a great way to find out more about what is important and meaningful in their lives. 

We have started using this grammar resource from Learning at the Primary Pond. 

We reflected on our demonstration of the Core Competency of Collaboration. 

We read Fall Is Here, a Strong Readers book, and drew pictures to represent our visualization of the poem using a template from Reading Power by Adrienne Gear.  

We have started rehearsing our two poems for the winter holiday concert: "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost, which we will recite in chorus, and the first section of "The Bells" by Edgar Allan Poe - each student will have their own line to say. 

For Show and Tell this month, each student brought in a "Guess My Number". This is the process: the student doing their show and tell reads aloud their three clues. Then, all of the students whisper to their neighbours what they think the number is. Next, anyone who thinks they know can raise their hand. The student doing their show and tell calls on classmates until someone guesses the number correctly.

We also worked through this addition to 100 unit. Based on formative assessment at the beginning of the month, I identified four students who were already strong in the skills covered in this unit. Our Resource Teacher put together duotangs of more challenging work for those four kids so that they'd have something to work on as an extension after finishing the whole class assignments. 

Upon reflection, after teaching the unit linked above, I feel that going forward into future years, it would be best to spread these lessons out over a longer period of time so that I am not teaching so many strategies and concepts so quickly. For example, I might consider running this unit simultaneously with something like geometry over two months instead of one so that the students have more time to practice and get comfortable with each concept before we move on. 

This month, we wrote affirmations! 

We also focused on perseverence as a concept throughout the month and took time to reflect in our agendas about ways in which we have persevered through challenges. 

We worked on two projects this month:

1. Students were challenged to turn a paper plate into anything they can dream of! 

2. We did the classic Not a Stick project! 

We have worked through the following activities in this water cycle unit:

1. K and W of KWL - Prior to completing this, we read a water cycle book from Reading A-Z so that students would have a foundation of knowledge to work from.

2. We completed a web about the water cycle while reading a book about the topic from Epic. In September, we did a task like this as part of our thermal energy; that time, I modelled how to do the task through writing and thinking aloud, and students copied down what I wrote. This time, I still scaffolded the task and did some modelling, but I gave the students more leeway to consider what they think is important to record.

3. We played a vocabulary matching game as a group, then students individually completed a vocab matching worksheet.

4. We read a passage about the water cycle from the unit and completed cut-and-paste diagrams. 

5. We wrote about what life would be like without water. This was a four day project:

Day 1: We filled in a concept flower to show some of the many uses of water in day-to-day life.

Day 2: We filled in another concept flower to show what life would be like if we didn't have water.

Day 3: Students filled in a planning sheet that asked them to imagine a morning, afternoon, and evening in their life without water.

Day 4: Students wrote narratives about their day without water.

6. We completed a flipbook inquiry project about the importance of conserving water. I used Microsoft Copilot (similar to Chat GPT) to generate readings to build the students' knowledge on the topic. 

We have now (finally!) completed our Me on the Map booklets! 

We read the books Schools, Children, and Birthdays Around the World by Margriet Ruurs and used Venn diagrams to compare and contrast other children's lives with our own!

We created a map display to show where our families come from. 

We also had fun creating treasure maps and writing clues using cardinal directions!