Ms. Gardner's Grade 1 - 2023 2024

  November 24 Thank you to all parents for connecting during parent teacher conferences.  I hope you enjoyed the update on your child’s progress so far and the next steps for the second part of this term.  It is so wonderful to take time to reflect on the progress that everyone has already shown since the start of this year and I am so proud of each student and the growth they have shown already.  Grade one is always such a remarkable year, as big changes can happen in a relatively short period of time.  It was wonderful to hear the positive feedback regarding home literacy and we encourage you to enjoy reading at home.  I’m excited for continuing this journey and what lies ahead as we continue through this year. This week, we moved into exploring Science and the topic of Matter as students analyze properties of objects and investigate how they can be changed.  We began by talking and thinking about objects.  We then looked at a variety of differe...

  Patterns, Patterns Everywhere!  In the past few weeks, we have moved on in our math to now looking at learning about patterns.  We have been working on making and creating, describing and transferring patterns in math.  Along with this we have also been discussing different communities that we belong to, specifically our family.  On Friday, in a cross curricular activity we create a pattern based on the members of our family.  Students were asked to represent each member of their family (who lives directly in their house) with one colour.  They then had to build their ‘family’ pattern using interlocking blocks.  The pattern then had to be repeated 3 times, as a pattern is not a pattern if it does not repeat at least 3 times.  Students then transferred their block pattern to using beads and created a family bracelet.  They have brought home their family pattern bracelet and hopefully they will share it with you.   Success Crit...

  The Power of One  As a grade one group we began the school year building our classroom community. As part of our School Development Plan in connection with our Wellness Curriculum we read several books such as Don’t Eat Your Classmates, Our Class is a Family and Kindness is my Superpower. All of these books had the theme of kindness. Through lessons, discussions and reflections our students built an understanding of how we show kindness to ourselves, each other, and this place. Next, we read The Power of One. Students were asked to identify ways they show kindness and contribute to creating a respectful classroom community.  Taking a closer look… When designing our next tasks we wanted our learners to recognize how every individual is unique and can make a difference. We wanted the children to be able to recognize those characteristics in themselves. Connecting to our work around Terry Fox and Phyllis Webstad, we looked at the characteristics that made each of these ind...