Happy Friday November 29!

1. Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!
2. A huge thank you to all the kids and families that donated for Movember. We raised over $400!
3. Wednesday, Dec. 4 at 6:30 (Doors open at 6) the Grades 1, 2, and 3 classes will perform for our winter concert!
4. Just a reminder to make sure students are doing mathletics at home! I posted new assignments this week.
5. Field trip forms sent home today. We are going to Telus Spark Dec 11th to explore the center and learn about magnets!
6. Green Calendar sent home for December today

Today I sent home the field trip form for our upcoming field trip. We need volunteers for the trip! If you have your police clearance we would love to have you join us :)
Today in room 5!

We began our day with our monthly pillars of care assembly. Congrats to the winners of the pillars of care and punctuality awards in room 5!
We also enjoyed the video of all the cool things BHS students did this month.
We finished off the assembly with the baby shark dance done by Mr Mahon and yours truly in a shark onesie! Kids really got a kick out seeing their teachers being silly. Way to go everyone for raising $400!

After our assembly the students did a math talk involving the estimation of chocolate within a jar.
They had to begin by seeing, thinking and wondering what they saw on the screen.
Next they saw some pics breaking down how many chocolates were in each bag and how many were left over. Students then had use their knowledge to break down the bags and figure out how many chocolates were in each bag. In the end watched a video explaining how to solve the problems. It was great to see all the students strategies for solving this multistep problem!
I wanted to post some pics of the experiment but I do not have access to the photos from the site.

Students then headed to the gym for a rehearsal of the song we will be performing at our Winter Concert with all students.

We finished off the day with a science lesson from our student teacher. We learned about different strengths of magnets and how magnetic fields will travel through an object. After some exploring with magnets and painting using magnetism we reached the end of our day.

Hope everyone has a nice weekend and stays warm!

Happy Wednesday Nov 27!
Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!

Movember donations graciously accepted by the students at lunch time just outside the learning commons. I can also take them from students to submit votes as well. Just to clarify, votes are for the worst mustache! If you want to see Mr Lancee with dyed hair and mustache then vote for him!
Wednesday, Dec. 4 the Grades 1, 2, and 3 classes will perform for our winter concert!
Friday Nov 29 is the November Pillars of Care Assembly!
Just a reminder to make sure students are doing mathletics at home! I posted new assignments today :)

The Blend this week is CH!
Today in room 5!

We began our day with our morning meeting. After the usual month, day, weather and number of days in school we practiced counting to 100 by 10's and 5's. Students got a kick out of turning their backs to the screen to count to 100 without looking!

After morning meeting we had some quiet reading time in which I was able to read with some students. I am impressed by the growth this year in room 5 and how students are developing their independence.

After gym and some two handed catCHing lessons for basketball we transitioned into snack. While the students munCHed and crunCHed I read them the first chapter of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. After reading the students did a character sketch and added adjectives to write about Charlie!

During math today the students did their tri-weekly basic facts followed by some math games using our hundreds charts. Race to 100 and hundreds chart battleship were a huge hit!

In the afternoon the students did a large science experiment in which they tested the strengths of magnets. We used metal circles, screws, and paperclips as our materials to test!
The magnets we used were:

The block magnet had a handle which we called the wand.

Students predicted the amount of metal each magnet would pick up and then tested their magnet to find the result. The students were so excited see if their predictions would come true!

We finished off the day with an indoor recess before heading to music!

Hope everyone has a nice evening and stays warm :)
Mr Lancee

Happy Tuesday Nov 26!
Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!

Movember donations graciously accepted by the students at lunch time just outside the learning commons. I can also take them from students to submit votes as well. Just to clarify, votes are for the worst mustache! If you want to see Mr Lancee with dyed hair and mustache then vote for him!
Wednesday, Dec. 4 the Grades 1, 2, and 3 classes will perform for our winter concert!
Friday Nov 29 is the November Pillars of Care Assembly!
Just a reminder to make sure students are doing mathletics at home! I posted new assignments today :)

I wanted to inform everyone that an incident took place today in which the classroom had to be evacuated. The students quickly moved from our room into room 6 where we continued our writing.
Thank you.

Today the students began their day with a math talk using the problem:

Is it true?
8 > 5+5
If it is false...make it true.

It was great to see how students have been developing their number sense and using their addition skills to solve this problem! Students had to take it a step further to make it true...
See if you can solve it at home!

After morning meeting we moved into some quiet reading in which all the students read to self using their new leveled books.

After gym we returned to class and began to write about what kinds of pets would make a perfect pet! Students started brainstorming common animals and then transitioned into what it would be like to own some unusual pets like sharks or dinosaurs!

After lunch the students went to music before returning to class to do science. Today we looked at four different magnets: Bar, ring, horseshoe and wand. Tomorrow we will be testing the strength of these magnets!

We finished off our day by looking at the novel study, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory! The reading of this novel will help to shape our writing for the next little while. Beginning with characters and settings.

Hope everyone has a great evening!
Mr Lancee

Happy Monday Nov 25!
Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!

Movember donations graciously accepted by the students at lunch time just outside the learning commons. I can also take them from students to submit votes as well. Just to clarify, votes are for the worst mustache! If you want to see Mr Lancee with dyed hair and mustache then vote for him!
Wednesday, Dec. 4 the Grades 1, 2, and 3 classes will perform for our winter concert!
Friday Nov 29 is the November Pillars of Care Assembly!
Just a reminder to make sure students are doing mathletics at home! I posted new assignments today :)

This week in room 5:

Language Arts:
Reading-Focusing on reading strategies and use of blend: Ch
Writing-Working on writing independence (sounding out independently) and enhancing beginnings of stories by developing the character and setting.

Math:
Mathletics
Place value-Written form of numbers, greater than & less than, counting to and from 100 by 2, 5, 10.

Social:
Prairies-Finished climate today, doing Jobs and resources the next few days.

Science:
Magnetism-What is a magnet? Types of magnets, comparing strength of magnets, metals that attract magnets, and magnetic fields.

Have a great evening everyone!
Mr Lancee

Happy Wednesday Nov 20!
Nov 21, 22 will be student led conferences (Nov 21: 3:30-7 Nov 22: 8-12)
No school Nov 22 (other then conferences!)
Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!
Please make sure you send your child with gloves, hats, mits, scarves or whatever they need to stay warm at lunch and recess!


Movember donations graciously accepted by the students at lunch time just outside the learning commons. I can also take them from students to submit votes as well. Just to clarify, votes are for the worst mustache! If you want to see Mr Lancee with dyed hair and mustache then vote for him!


Just a quick reminder that tomorrow and Friday we have student led conferences! Please book yourself a spot so that we can talk about the amazing growth and some things to work on in grade 2!

Have a nice evening :)

Happy Tuesday Nov 19!
Nov 21, 22 will be student led conferences (Nov 21: 3:30-7 Nov 22: 8-12) Please sign up :)
No school Nov 22 (other then conferences!)
Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!
Please make sure you send your child with gloves, hats, mits, scarves or whatever they need to stay warm at lunch and recess!
TOMORROW! Wednesday, Nov 20th, Reverse Day - Students dress as teachers, teachers dress as students.

Movember donations graciously accepted by the students at lunch time just outside the learning commons. I can also take them from students to submit votes as well. Just to clarify, votes are for the worst mustache! If you want to see Mr Lancee with dyed hair and mustache then vote for him!

Today I sent home the Alberta Health Services Fluoride varnish dental consents for our Grade 2's. Please return the forms by Nov 27 to schedule your child's dental check up.

Today in room 5:

The students began their day with a quick morning meeting and practicing counting by 5's and tens from 5-100 and back! We then transitioned into a work block and working to finish our monster stories. I still have a few students that need to finish their stories tomorrow before we show them to parents on Thursday and Friday!

After an intense game of dodgeball (regular and don't throw your junk in my backyard) we headed back to class for snack.

As a class we explored the four ways to start stories creatively!
Great stories start with...
1. an action
2. a sound
3. thoughts or question
4. dialogue

These techniques get kids to write their stories with a creative edge over "Once upon a time"

In the afternoon the students went to music before returning to class.

For the last chunk of the day we explored the climate and weather of Saskatchewan. We discussed as a class what we would need if we were to travel their in both the winter and the summer. Students brainstormed that because the weather is similar to ours in Calgary we would need similar. We then used some cookie cutter people to draw the clothes they would need to bring.

Hope everyone has a nice evening and stays warm!

Mr Lancee

Happy Monday Nov 18!
Nov 21, 22 will be student led conferences (Nov 21: 3:30-7 Nov 22: 8-12)
No school Nov 22
Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!
Please make sure you send your child with gloves, hats, mits, scarves or whatever they need to stay warm at lunch and recess!
Wednesday, Nov 20th, Reverse Day - Students dress as teachers, teachers dress as students!
Movember donations graciously accepted by the students at lunch time just outside the learning commons. I can also take them from students to submit votes as well. Just to clarify, votes are for the worst mustache! If you want to see Mr Lancee with dyed hair and mustache then vote for him!


This week in room 5:

Language Arts:
Reading-Continuing our exploration of blends from last week with words that start with cl,pl and fl. Reading to self and someone to practice skills and strategies.

Writing- Working on beginning story strategies. Great ways to begin a story and revising our old stories. Also working on creating blends in word work!

Math:
Place value- specifically around expanded form of numbers. We are working towards playing a roll it, write it, expand it game. Expanded form= 31=30+1. This way of writing numbers helps kids to really see place value!

Social:
Prairies: Looking at bodies of water, climate, and jobs in the prairies this week.

Science:
Magnetism: exploring what metals magnets will attach to, as well the concepts of attract, repel, polarity and NS!

Today we began our day with ignite before our morning meeting.
We were practicing as a class how to count backwards from 100 today!
We were also learning about all the cl blend words such as claw, cloud, cliff and climb!

Next the students had a quick snack before heading off to gym.

Today the students used their monsters from the Monster Descriptive Writing to make a story.
Students had to make up a story about their monster and it could be about anything!
We will use these stories to shape our lessons in the next few days as we talk about beginnings.

We then learned in math how make the expanded form of numbers. Students were a bit confused as to why we can use addition at first, but they quickly got the hang of the basics!

In the afternoon we finished up our work with our buddies on creating IRIS goal strategies which we will be showing to parents on Thursday and Friday for student led conferences.

We finished our day learning about the bodies of water found in the prairies. We explored lakes, ponds, rivers and learned that their aren't any oceans in the prairies!

Have a great evening everyone!
Mr Lancee

Happy Friday Nov 15!
Nov 21, 22 will be student led conferences (Nov 21: 3:30-7 Nov 22: 8-12)
No school Nov 22
Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!
Please make sure you send your child with gloves, hats, mits, scarves or whatever they need to stay warm at lunch and recess!
Wednesday, Nov 20th, Reverse Day - Students dress as teachers, teachers dress as students!
Movember donations graciously accepted by the students at lunch time just outside the learning commons. I can also take them from students to submit votes as well. Just to clarify, votes are for the worst mustache! If you want to see Mr Lancee with dyed hair and mustache then vote for him!

Today!

The students began their day with a science lesson from Mr Sadowsky's student teacher.
She taught us a lesson in magnetism in which the students learned about the attraction and repelling of magnets.

Next we went to gym for some station time before Netflix Friday for 15 mins.

I gave the students a half hour block to read their library books and some free books donated to us by the TD bank!

We then had a math lesson in which were ordering numbers from least to greatest.

for example:

21, 35, 1, 7, 10
reordered as:
1, 7, 10, 21, 35

We finished off our day with cleaning the room before some relaxing earned time.
I will send an update with what we will be doing this coming week on Sunday :)

Hope everyone has a great weekend!

Happy Thursday Nov 14!
Nov 21, 22 will be student led conferences (Nov 21: 3:30-7 Nov 22: 8-12)
No school Nov 22
Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!
Please make sure you send your child with gloves, hats, mits, scarves or whatever they need to stay warm at lunch and recess!
Wednesday, Nov 20th, Reverse Day - Students dress as teachers, teachers dress as students!


I was away from school today but I wanted to inform the parents of a fundraiser taking place in our school!

The staff and students are supporting the Movember charity this month for cancer awareness for males. The men in the building are growing (attempting to grow) mustaches to raise awareness and have a competition to grow the best/worst mustache. Students can bring in donations of 1 dollar to vote for the mustache of their choice! The participants are:
Mr Lancee
Mr Berry
Mr Mueller
Mr Hebert
Mr Sadowsky
Mr Jackson
Mr Beechey
Mr Mahon
The gentleman with the least votes will have to dye their hair and mustache for the pillars of care assembly at the end of the month.

Also, if we raise $400, Mr Mahon and I will be dressing up as sharks and doing the baby shark dance in front of the school!

Thank you for all your help!
Mr Lancee

Happy Tuesday Nov 12
Nov 21, 22 will be student led conferences (Nov 21: 3:30-7 Nov 22: 8-12)
No school Nov 22

Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!
Please make sure you send your child with gloves, hats, mits, scarves or whatever they need to stay warm at lunch and recess!
Wednesday, Nov 20th, Reverse Day - Students dress as teachers, teachers dress as students!
Fun lunch form sent home today!

Today an incident occurred in my classroom in which a student threw my classroom supplies around the room. The rest of the class was out of the room at this time so we did not need to do an evacuation. As a preventative measure I have moved all the students supplies off the shelves and up to a higher location. I have also placed locks on my cupboards for the safety of the students.
I am sorry for this change in routine and classroom layout but the students safety is my number one concern.



Today!
We began our day with a number talk in which the students looks at the picture below...

Students gave several answers.
False because the counting is not 231 or 312. 2+3 does not equal 1.
True because the counting is 123. or 321.
3 is 2+1.       3 is 1 and 2.     One student even noticed....red and blue make purple!

It was great to see how students verbally explain their thinking and defend their arguments!
After some quiet reading and gym we transitioned into word work in which the students wrote the words of the week in three forms! Rainbow, bubble and fancy!

As a class we explored writing numbers from 1-100 as place value blocks. We will continue this skill tomorrow!

In the afternoon the students went to music before we had some time to cut up our cities for Calgary mural. Tomorrow we will continue our exploration of Saskatchewan and the prairies!.

Have a great evening everyone!
Mr Lancee

Happy Friday Nov 8
Nov 21, 22 will be student led conferences (Nov 21: 3:30-7 Nov 22: 8-12)
No school Nov 22
No School next Monday for Remembrance day
Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!
Please make sure you send your child with gloves, hats, mits, scarves or whatever they need to stay warm at lunch and recess!
Wednesday, Nov 20th, Reverse Day - Students dress as teachers, teachers dress as students!

Today the students began their day with Mr Sadowsky's student teacher doing an introductory lesson to magnets! Students were able to use predictions and small magnets to test what kind of objects in the room were magnetic!

We then went outside for gym before coming inside to have snack for netflix Friday! After the 15 minutes of netflix Friday the students did some exploration of the animals that were involved in WW1 and WW2. The students were amazed to see how elephants, pigeons, dogs, cats and even bears greatly helped soldiers in many ways. 

Next the students went to the gym for our Remembrance day assembly. 
Students listened to books, stories and songs dedicated to the memory of the soldiers.
It was a beautiful somber assembly and the students were extremely respectful.

We finished off our day with some catch up time before doing some razkids and mathletics on the ipads. 

Hope everyone has a nice weekend!
Mr Lancee

Happy Thursday Nov 7
Nov 21, 22 will be student led conferences
No school Nov 22
No School next Monday for Remembrance day
Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!
Please make sure you send your child with gloves, hats, mits, scarves or whatever they need to stay warm at lunch and recess!
Friday there will be a remembrance day assembly at 10:30 am
Wednesday, Nov 20th, Reverse Day - Students dress as teachers, teachers dress as students!


Today we began our day with Ignite before heading off to library.
Ms. P must have thought we did a great dance in library because she turned the library into a dance party with different songs of the students choice.

After gym with Mr Sadowsky we transitioned into our star of the week writing.
We are up six sentences each time we write about our star!

The students then had some time in math doing some place value practice. Students had to look at the number of tens and ones were in each picture before recording the totals. Next week we will be moving into regrouping with ones and tens in place value.

After lunch we had some time with our buddies making poppies for a large wreath for our remembrance day assembly.

We finished off our day watching part of a magnetism video to explore some magnets before our first lesson tomorrow in magnetism!

Hope everyone has a great evening!
Tomorrow is Friday!

Happy Wednesday Nov 6!
Apologies for the late blog! For some reason it did not want to post!
I will write another blog for this evening as well.

Reminders:
Nov 21, 22 will be student led conferences
No school Nov 22
No School next Monday for Remembrance day
Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!
Please make sure you send your child with gloves, hats, mits, scarves or whatever they need to stay warm at lunch and recess!
Friday there will be a remembrance day assembly at 10:30 am

Today in room 5!

We began our day with our usual morning meeting.
Students then transitioned into dance where they jived and jazzed around the gym!

We then had some time after snack to start talking about blends at the beginning of words. todays blend was "bl". Students thought of words like blue, block, blonde and blew for the bl blend.
We then transitioned into a making words activity in which students were sheets and followed instructions on how to make words! We started simple with the vowel a and consonants c s r t.

Then we made at, art, tar, cat, cart, cat, star, stars and many many more!

Students then did their first number talk!

Without using paper, only discussion we talked about the equation 2+2=3+1 and whether the statement was true!
It was great to see all the opinions on whether the equation was true! What do you think parents? Talk with your child about the equation!

In the afternoon we examined the prairies' landforms. Students had to use their sight to think of words that matched the prairies and then draw the features of the landscape.

We finished off the day discussing melting! We used a hair dryer to melt ice and crayons!
It was amazing to see how solids can change states to liquids!

Happy Monday Nov 4!

Reminders:
Class picture day was today! Retake photos will be sent home soon.
Nov 21, 22 will be student led conferences
No school Nov 22
Make sure you are reading at home and coming to show me so I can hand out hockey cards!
Please make sure you send your child with gloves, hats, mits, scarves or whatever they need to stay warm at lunch and recess!

Today the students began their day with Ignite! They were all very happy to be back at school after the long weekend doing their favorite morning activities.

We spent a chunk of time this morning talking about our new seating plan and the new addition to the classroom! We have started to use quiet critters!
These little critters sit at the students desk when they are working quietly. They cannot be touched and their are 18 different critters to see! The students were able to name them and write some descriptions for each quiet critter!
They were a huge hit!


After we wrote about our critters the students did their number of the week before lunch.

When we returned from lunch we went to check on a science experiment from the morning!
We placed some water in an ice cube and took it to the freezer. The water was left in the freezer for 3 hours before we checked it again. When we returned the water had changed states and was now a solid...ICE! We recorded our findings and went to recess. Students then played a game in which that had to write and represent different numbers from 1-100 on a chart. Tomorrow we will be re-practicing this skill but over several examples!

Have a great evening everyone!