We are enjoying learning about poems and we had a lot of fun pulling (so many) library books off the shelves to create spine poems! We are so thankful to everyone who works so hard and volunteers in our library to re-shelve books so we can do really neat things like this! If you ever want to volunteer to help in our library please don’t hesitate to contact the school! We started off by reading the spine poem Mrs. N created to inspire us. She had us visualize the time of day this poem may take place, how it could be like a dream, and how it told a very short story.

Today is Monday.
I dreamt,
The most magnificent thing.
The shape of my heart,
It looked like spilt milk.
Day is done.
Tuesday.
Again.
Spine poem by: Mrs. Normand

After we had a good understanding of what a spine poem is Mrs. N. gave us the choice of working in a group or alone to create our poems. Here are the spine poems we created. Try to visualize the poems in your head as you read them! We are learning to do that as we listen to stories and poems.

Day is done,
Today is Monday.
Little lost bat.
Tuesday,
I dreamt,
The cat came back,
It looked like spilt milk.

Wake up world,
One world together,
The earth made new.
King of the skies,
Listen to the wind.

Water,
Cats,
The cat came back.

Little lost bat,
On the move,
Today is Monday.

A visit to the circus,
Nothing like a puffin.
Star stuff,
The right word,
Mr. Ferris and his wheel.

David smells,
Smelly socks,
Again!
Oh no! Not again!
David gets in trouble.

Oh no!
My crocodile does not bite.
How big is it?
Dealing with bullying.

How to be a cat,
I am cat.
Cat, you better come home.
Why?
Mattoo, Let’s play.
The lighthouse cat.

Bear under the stairs,
Don’t wake the bear!
Mr. Bear and the bear.

One special day,
The cat next door,
The Klondike cat,
My house.

The runaway hug,
Hug me,
When I feel sad.
Hug Machine,
Happy!

 5^th – 8^th – Book Fair (Please see the school website or class newsletter for times)

6^th & 8^th – P/S/T Conferences & School Clothing available for purchase

 8^th – Picture Orders are due

9th – Class Celebration (Thanksgiving) in the afternoon

12^th – No school – Thanksgiving

26^th – Picture Retakes

30^th– Halloween @ Warman Elementary (Please see the classroom or school newsletter for guidelines)

On Monday afternoon we had the perfect winter weather for snowshoeing.  Most of the students (and their teacher) had never been snowshoeing before, so it was lots of fun to try something new.  We enjoyed walking through the trees behind the school, climbing hills and playing in the snow. Everyone gave their best effort and got lots of fresh air and exercise!

Mrs. M.

On Monday afternoon our class was excited to start our community garden project, hosted by the        U of S nursing students. The students listened to the story, Stone Soup, and then had the opportunity to make their own soup. From the story the students learned about the importance of being part of a community and sharing with others. Almost everyone decided to give the soup a try and some students enjoyed it so much, they went back for a second helping! The students also had fun playing a team building game.  Each group had to try to get a hula-hoop around their circle as quickly as possible without using their hands. As the students came up with new strategies, they had fun trying to beat their fastest times, while helping each other and building trust and teamwork. We are excited to be a part of this project and are looking forward to planting some tomatoes, sweet peppers and cucumbers next week!

Mrs. M.

Today was a day filled with lots of exercise and physical activity! This morning we were excited to be invited to spend some time in the gym with our Kindergarten care partners. Everyone had lots of fun and set a good example for their younger buddies.

In the afternoon we walked over to the Legends Center to spend the afternoon skating and playing in the gym with three other grade 2 classes. It was great to see everyone participating and enjoying the time with their classmates. The time went by all too quickly and on our way back to school, many students were already asking,  “When can we go back again?”

Mrs. M.

Today was the 100th day of school and we did lots of fun activities to celebrate. We made special 100 day glasses to wear, read the book 100th Day Worries, and figured out the best ways to count 100 cube-a-links, Popsicle sticks and blocks. During math time we played Hundreds Chart and Addition Bingo and for art we created gumball machines with 100 gumballs in each one. We also brought home a 100 day bookmark describing things we would and wouldn’t like to have 100 of. Most of us agreed that we would like to eat 100 candies, but no one wanted 100 brothers or sisters or 100 diapers!

Today we met another one of Mrs. N’s relatives, her Auntie, Dr. Editor! She sure does remind us of Mrs. N. and her cousin, Mrs. DNA. They all have so much in common!

Dr. Editor came to our class today to help us learn how to take two words and put them together into one word that means the same thing. We had to wear special masks while we did surgery.  We used “stitches” (glue), “gloves” (mini mitts), “scalpels” (scissors), and “band-aids” (….they were really band-aids) to perform surgery on words to make them into contractions.  Dr. Editor had us listen very closely (she said that in order to be good doctors we had to follow directions) as she explained the rules of how to perform surgery on our “patients” (words).

Dr. Editor told us that there are many other word combinations to make contractions and that maybe she would visit another day to help us learn about them, but for today we performed surgery on contractions using the word “not.” She didn’t talk about the word “won’t” or any other contractions that don’t follow the normal rules (We know that there are so many rule breakers in the English language, we love to find them in our reading!) perhaps next time Dr. Editor visits she will help us to understand the word “won’t”!

were + not = weren’t        have + not = haven’t        should + not = shouldn’t         could + not = couldn’t

has + not = hasn’t        had + not = hadn’t        is + not = isn’t        would + not = wouldn’t

We all were good medical students today and we made great beginning doctors. Hopefully with more practice we will be able to use more contractions in our stories and writing!

* Some of our “patients” didn’t get photographed today due to medical complications and the need for follow up surgeries.

Check in again soon, Tuesday is the 100th day of school and Mrs. M has some really great learning activities planned!

Mrs. N.

There is no school for students on Friday January 30^th. Since there is no school on Friday our spelling test is on Thursday this week.

The grade 2’s are excited that they have an opportunity to be part of Dance Club this year. Some students took home permission forms yesterday. No prior experience is necessary, but students need to be committed to attend lunch hour practices in order to be part of the club.

In Math we are continuing to learn about addition and subtraction to 18. Please work at home practicing Math facts with your child. Dollar stores often carry flash cards; this is a simple and fun way to build up your child’s mental Math skills. At school we practice using a variety of different strategies to solve addition and subtraction equations. We use number lines, counters, 10 frames, fact families, and sometimes we even draw pictures to help us understand what a question is asking.

We have been working on missing piece addition. Knowing fact families really helps us to do these types of questions. A missing piece addition question might look something like this ___ +7=13. We know that these numbers can be moved around as they are part of a fact family. This means we can rewrite the question and use subtraction to help us find the missing number. Our new question becomes 13-7=___. Then from there we are able to do subtraction to figure out the missing piece. We may also see questions that look like this 4+___=8. Again we can turn it into a subtraction question 8-4=___ and then we can figure out the missing piece. Here is a link to a website that we enjoy using during computer time. Without a membership you are able to do a limited number of Math questions every day, but if you are looking for a little extra practice at home this is a great place to start! http://ca.ixl.com/math/grade-2/complete-the-addition-sentence-one-digit

We are having so much fun inferring in our reading! Today we worked in groups reading four different stories on iPads. We had to really use our inferring skills today because some of the stories were kind of strange. One of the stories was about cows, another was about some parents acting really strange, another one of the stories was about seeing things like boulders moving and snow that was really newspaper, and the last story was about people waiting for a train that was delayed. As we read each of the stories we began to notice similarities between them. We suspected that Mrs. Normand was playing some kind of trick on us because she asked us to read all four of them! We were right; the trick was that all four stories were related to each other.

If you get a chance to ask us about it we would love to tell you more. If you want to read the stories (and story…as we learned all of them make up one story) for yourself the book is called Black and White and it was written by David Macaulay. We really enjoyed reading it and know you will too!

Mrs. N

On Thursday we got to see ALL of the “evidence” that was in the envelopes. Each group presented the evidence that they had and it was exciting to see what other people had in the envelopes! As we saw the objects we hung them on a timeline on the board to try and piece together Tim & Grandma’s day.

Many times as an object was presented someone from another group had an “Ah Ha!” moment because they now understood how their evidence fit into the big picture! For example one group had a thimble in their envelope as evidence. From this we could infer that someone was sewing. As more evidence was shown to the group our thinking changed! Another group had dice in their envelope and another group had monopoly money in theirs. Suddenly our clues all fit together because some of us knew that a thimble was a game piece in monopoly. Our thinking changed from the idea of someone sewing to someone (we still don’t know who) playing monopoly! From this activity we learned that when we infer sometimes our thinking can change as new information is presented.

Some of our evidence gave an exact time (they went sledding at 2:00), some of it gave us an idea of when an activity took place (they baked cookies sometime in the morning), and some of it we will have to do our best to infer. For example we know that someone played monopoly, someone crocheted, and someone painted, but we don’t know who did these things or the exact time they did them.

Here are a few pictures of our activity.

We are looking forward to writing short stories or journal entries about Tim and Grandma’s day based on what we learned. It will be interesting to see how each of us uses the clues to infer about Tim and Grandma’s day.

Mrs. N