We worked on four Thanksgiving activities:

1. We compared and contrasted American and Canadian Thanksgiving. You can read the caption of this Instagram post to find out more about our process. 

2. We created gratitude zines using this template from Austin Kleon. 

3. In library, we made thank you cards to express our appreciation of staff members at our school.

4. We read the Reading A-Z book Celebrating Food and Family and recorded the main ideas and supporting details of each section using the accompanying graphic organizer. 

We created haunted house collages and wrote descriptions that invite our readers to visualize! 

We also wrote sticker stories using Halloween stickers. I teach Grades 2/3 but I used the Grade 1 narrative writing graphic organizer from Reading A-Z, and I actually still found it too complex for some of my students (over half of whom are English Language Learners). Next time we write narratives, I plan to find or create a very simple template that just asks students to plan the character, setting, problem, and solution of their story. 

We went on a field trip to the Richmond Country Farms pumpkin patch! The next day, students wrote personal narratives about our trip using the Reading A-Z personal narrative Grade 1 level graphic organizer—I found that this was the right level for them at this point in the year. 

We also created still lifes of our pumpkins using this video. We used thick Crayola markers and painted over them with water as seen in the video—I was curious to see how they’d turn out. It worked fine but I actually think typical watercolor paints would have probably worked better—or crayons as depicted as the other option in the video. 

We are working through the Dolch Primer words. We focus on one word each day, and I assess every three weeks or so. 

Based on formative assessment, I created two spelling groups: the Polar Bears and the Care Bears. The Polar Bears complete level 1 of these worksheets, and the Care Bears complete level 2. The main difference is that the level 1 worksheets require students to cut and paste to create the word, while the level 2 worksheets require students to write a sentence using the word. The Care Bears already know how to spell most of the words we are working on, so for them, the value in this activity is that it gives them an opportunity to practice sentence writing each day and gives me an opportunity to offer them feedback, e.g., on capitalization, punctuation, and spelling other words in the sentence (in addition to the daily target word). 

I also play the Jolly Phonics songs for the students that correspond to one or two of the sounds in each day’s word—usually the vowels and/or digraphs—and we talk about the connection between the sounds and the spelling. For example, if the word of the day is “all”, I would play the short o Jolly Phonics song, and then discuss with the students that even though the sound is a short o, it’s represented by the letter a—this is a tricky part of the word that they have to remember. 

This whole routine only takes about 5 minutes each day and it is proving effective for helping students learn to spell these important high frequency words! 

Inspired by The Best Part of Me: Children talk about their bodies in pictures and words by Wendy Ewald, students wrote about their favourite body parts. This is one of my favourite writing lessons! 

We engaged in the math routines detailed here. 

We also worked through this unit. It was quite easy for some students. Upon reflection, I wish that I had done more formative assessment so that I could have differentiated more effectively. You live and you learn!

One activity I thought was particularly valuable and engaging for the students was having them create 100s chart puzzles for each other. These are the instructions I gave them: 

1. Use one color to scribble on the back of your hundreds chart.

2. Cut your hundreds chart into about 10 pieces.

3. Trade with a partner.

4. Put your partner’s hundreds chart back together. Glue it on construction paper. 

This was a good opportunity for students to see patterns in the chart. And they enjoyed it, too!

We completed three more pages of the Me On the Map booklet: This is My City; This is My Province; and This is My Country. 

We also read a book about British Columbia from our school library and students filled in a graphic organizer to show 6 facts that they learned about BC, written in point form (e.g., what the flag looks like; that Victoria is the capital; that BC has mountains; etc.). 

We read the book Mapping Sam and created our own community using this template. This is one of my favorite projects! 

We worked through the remainder of this unit. We have now done everything except the summative assessment, which we will do next week. 

A couple highlights:

We melted ice cubes using our hands. This was a good demonstration of conduction (heat transferring from our hands to the ice cube through touch) and radiation (heat from the sun’s rays also contributed to melting the ice cube). Super simple and memorable for the students!

We also really enjoyed experimenting with different materials to see which were the best conductors and which were the best insulators. As the students watched, I poured boiling water into several jars and measured the temperature of the water in each to get a baseline. Then, we covered the jars in various materials, e.g., tin foil, a cloth towel, paper towel, etc. After 5 minutes, we measured again and calculated the difference between the first and second measurements to see which jars of water retained the most heat. Most students predicted that tin foil would be the best insulator and they were surprised that in fact the best insulator was the paper towel! 

We did two activities for Career this month:

1. We watched this video and I had students write out the message of loving-kindness (“May you be healthy; may you be happy; may you be safe; may your life be filled with joy”) in their agendas. 

2. As a class, we brainstormed ideas for how we can demonstrate our school values: thoughtfulness; inclusion; generosity; eco-friendliness; responsibility; and safety. Then, each table group made a poster about one of these values. Although we’ve done partner work before, this was our first time working in groups, and it was a good opportunity to talk about norms for group work and how we can collaborate successfully.

One family donated a big bag of cardboard rolls. I showed students some examples of the types of Halloween crafts they can make using these rolls, and let each of them choose and execute their own idea. I was so impressed by their creativity!