Archived Photos of Weekly Learning

May 19th - May 22nd, 2015

Hello All!

Here is what has happened in our class this week (so far)!

As you can see, our caterpillars have moved to a new home.  All of the little friends that have formed chrysalises have been moved to a cylindrical container (just your ordinary laundry hamper!)

We have been told that they could hatch as quickly as next week.  We can't wait!!!

This was our book of the week.  As a follow-up activity on Thursday, the students were asked to write about their favourite gift that they ever received or gave to someone else.

Here is what they said:

We began a unit on money.  This strand of mathematics tied in wonderfully with the students' interests in turning our centres into various stores. 

This week, we turned two of our centres into an ice cream store (the sand table) and a toy store (the drama centre).  At both stores, I placed a till with toy money ($10 bills, $5 dollar bills, toonies and loonies).  As I visited the students at each centre, I was pleased to see the students using the money to buy various items.  These moments gave the students excellent opportunities to familiarize themselves with different denominations of money, add small figures together, and skip count by various values (2's, 5's and 10's).  

At Clean Up Time, I brought the ice cream store's till to the carpet and we as a class determined how much the store made by using numbers on the hundred's chart to represent each bill and coin in the till (picture below).  We started with all of the 10 dollar bills (the biggest denomination) and worked our way down to the loonies (smallest denomination).

Below are some pictures of the stores and the tills that the students used.

We also played at a Word Centre where we circled numbers and words that we knew from our poem of the week ("Canadian Coins") and our Popcorn Words list.

We also played Rhyming Word Bingo.

We also played with word fish to make cool new words and patterns!

We also found weeds and other things growing in our garden.  We drew what we saw in our Gardening Books.

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton





April 20th - May 15th, 2015

Hello All,

Here is what has been going on in our classroom over the last few weeks.

As you can see, we have done a lot on caterpillars this last little while!

We ordered 24 caterpillars from a local farm and have had fun watching their progress ever since.

As you see from the photographs, the caterpillars are alive and well and growing before our eyes!

We have used this new addition to our classroom to link books like "The Very Hungry Caterpillar" and "A Caterpillar's Life" and "Life of a Caterpillar" to real life.

As an art project, each student made a visual representation of a caterpillar's life cycle (from eggs, to caterpillar, to chrysalis and finally to butterfly) as discussed in the book "Life of a Caterpillar".

I have also put observation booklets by the caterpillars for students to draw what they see.

As of today (May 19th), many of the caterpillars have formed chrysalises and have been moved to a larger container!  Pictures to follow soon.

We have also placed mealworms and beetles at this table to track their growth and development.

 

At the Art Centre, we worked with clay to create various things.  Before we worked with the clay, we drew drafts about what we wanted to make and tried to follow our drawings as a guide.  We also made 3D Shapes of our own!

 We went on a 2-D and 3-D Shape Hunt.  What shapes do you see?

We have started a little garden at the back of the school and have tracked its progress through drawings.  We weeded the garden ourselves and planted various small flowers (pansies, four o'clocks) and some green and yellow beans.  Photos of its progress will be posted in future blog entries.

We have been rehearsing our kindergarten graduation song a lot with the other kindergarten classes.

We can't wait to sing it for you at the Senior Kindergarten Graduation ceremony in June!

We dug for 3-D shapes at our Sand Table.

We played Shape Bingo!

Those are the main highlights.  We of course have continued with our literacy program, completing weekly Writers' Workshop pieces and Guided Reading responses, and have worked on a new poem every week.

Stay posted fore more!

-Mr. Ashton








April 13th - 17th, 2015

Hello All!

Here are some things we did this week in class.

We read The Very Hungry Caterpillar as our book of the week.  Then, we read "The Life of the Butterfly" and compared fiction and non-fiction texts.  Then, we played the game seen below where the students got to retell the story in their own words.

We did a shared writing activity and then the students wrote on a topic of their choice for Writers' Workshop.  We talked about common spelling mistakes when sounding out words (confusing one vowel for another) and the importance of leaving a "finger-space" between words.

To wrap up our work on capacity, the students tried to make a house that was big enough to hold one dinosaur.  Here are some of their designs.

Here is our poems of the week.

At our writing centre, some of our students tried to copy words from our Word Wall.

At our magnet centre, students created words that they know.

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton
April 7th - 10th, 2015

Hello All!

Here is what we have been up to this past week!

We had two special presentations.  One talked about the importance of keeping our teeth healthy with daily brushing and the other was our friend the fire fighter who taught us about what to do to keep us safe from fires.

We played a fun sight word game during Learning Centre Time.

We reviewed balance scales at one centre and introduced "capacity".  At the centre seen above, students guessed how many cups of liquid was in the third container, based on the amount placed in the previous two containers.

To introduce the concept of "capacity" we talked about the meaning of this word (i.e. how much "something" can hold).  As an introduction activity, I showed the students this bottle and asked them to use their imagination to draw something they think would probably hold more water than this bottle.

Here are the ideas that they came up with:

We also talked about measuring in millilitres.

We played this game that taught us about different word families.

For our Reading Buddies session this week, the Grade 6 students were given some tips on what to do after reading with our readers!

Here was our poem of the week.

Students also measured how much each container could hold and recorded their answer at the centre seen above.

We also did another piece for Writers' Workshop, went on a nature walk, and continued with our Guided Reading.

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton










March 30th - April 2nd, 2015

Hello All!

Here is what we have been up to this week!

We had our first session with our Reading Buddies from Mrs. Subzwari's Grade 6 class.  We greatly appreciated our new friend's helping us read our book bag books!

 Here was our new poem of the week.

As the students are interested in building things at the sand table, one of the provocations this week was to see if the students could create something that resembled an Inuksuk.  We read this book in class and learned the significance of this structure.

 Here we were creating wonderful creations at our sand table.

We counted the Froot Loops we covered our hands with and decided how close our estimate was compared to the actual amount.

 Here was one of our rhyming word centres!

For Writers' Workshop, the students were charged with the task to write their own sentences by using the "Popcorn Words" list in their red writing folders.

 Here are the Popcorn Words we studied this week.

More rhyming words/word family fun!

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton

February-March 2015

Hello All!

Here are the highlights of some of the things we have been doing in our classroom during the months of February and March.

We all made surveys during our Data Management on things that interested us.  We represented the information we recorded with check marks, tally marks, names and then created a pictograph during Learning Centre Time.

We worked on 20 Frames to review addition and subtraction concepts (E.g., "If this 20 Frame has 13 squares on it, how many more squares would it need to be full?")

We learned about making estimations and made fun guesses about the quantity of items in jars.  (E.g., "How many Smarties are in this jar?", "Are there more red or blue (jewels)?", "How many pieces of paper are in this jar?")  To help with the students' estimations, a hundreds chart was placed at the centre if they were not sure which number to pick.

To further our work on capacity and estimation, we did a group lesson and estimated how many 'candy balls' it would take to fill a jar.  We then found the actual amount and decided that our guess was pretty good as it was "pretty close" to the actual amount.  We then made estimations about how to many Fruit Loops it would take to cover our hands.  Next week, we will find the actual amount and decide whether our estimations were close to this amount.

This week, I read the book "Rhyming Dust Bunnies".  It taught us about rhyming words, specifically how two words need to have the same sounds at the end in order to rhyme.  The book was a "huge hit" in our classroom and inspired the students to make their own puppet show, spell out some of the rhyming words in the book at our Magnetic Letter Centre, and make rhyming words of their own at the Writing Centre.

Here are some art we created this week.

As an extension of our knowledge of rhyming words, students were asked if they could find pictures of things that rhymed.  If you turned these cards over, a word describing the picture appeared.  The students were able to look at the picture and then compare the letters in the words, observing how each pair of rhyming words had the same letters and/our sounds at the end of them.

We also played a fun math game.  Students would roll the dice and represent the amount using different coloured jewels.

 The students had fun answering addition questions with our Adding Machine!

Another fun math game!  Roll the dice, colour the numbered balloon!

The students had fun representing numbers and making cool designs at this centre.

The students were asked it they could create a structure in the water table.  Here are some of their creations!

Here was another fun math game Mrs. Prashad created!

Yet another fun math game!  Match the numbers with the right amount of dots!

Another fun building challenge! Shaving cream and foam blocks!

The students have taken an interest in superheroes.  Some of the activities we have done to foster their interest have included turning our Dramatic Centre into a "Bat Cave", making superhero capes, and completing some written pieces on this topic for Writers' Workshop, in which the students wrote about what super power they would most like to have.

We used the light cube to try to spell words.  It was a lot of fun!

We talked about signs of Spring and made works of art detailing some of these signs.  Some of the signs of Spring that the students came up with on their own included, bees making honey, flowers growing, green grass, snowing (occasionally) at the beginning of the season, playing outside without winter clothing, etc.

The students had fun making words at this centre.

Another fun activity!  The students made structures in the sand and then, using water bottles, they tested out their structures to see if they would survive a "rain storm".

We read several books on our emotions and wrote out all of the ways we could feel.

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton

January 19th - January 30th, 2015

Hello All,

Here are some things we did in our classroom over the past two weeks.

In connection with the art project we were working on, the students wrote about their favourite building in the imaginary town we created out of recyclable materials.

I have put a copy of the Fry 100 Sight Words ("popcorn words") in each student's writing folder for a quick reference when writing.  We talked about how words are placed in alphabetical order which will help them search this page for a word they wish to use in their writing.

Here are some of the big books and guided reading books that we read.

Our big books have served as great opportunities to discuss basic concepts of print, reviewing punctuation, and pointing out our "popcorn" words.

Here is a shape game we played at Learning Centre Time which also helped us with sentence structure.

Here are the materials we decorated to look like different buildings.  In addition to reviewing the names of different 3-D shapes, we also sounded out and wrote the names of each different building at this centre.

Here are some creations we made out of 2-D shapes.

The students enjoyed creating different vehicles (boats, cars, spaceships, trucks, etc.) out of lego.  We spent a lot of time during Show and Share Time discussing what we made and using our imagination about where these vehicles could take us!

Here are the "popcorn" words we studied over the past two weeks.

At the Playdough Centre, some students tried making some words that they knew.

We had a lot of fun at our new sensory centre, the Snow Table!

Here is our Shape Art Wall!

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton

January 12th - 16th, 2015

Hello All!

Here are some things we did in our classroom this week.

We went on a 2-D and 3-D shape hunt on our street.  Here are some pictures we took.

Can you see any shapes?

Above is our poem on 3-D shapes.

After watching a short video (Leapfrog) that talked about silent "e's", we came up with some examples of how this letter makes the first vowel in a word say its own name.

 We all made art of cut out 2-D shapes!

 We played and built with 3-D shapes at the sand table!

 We drew shapes we saw by looking out our window!

We made 3-D and 2-D shapes out of play dough and toothpicks.

These are the books we read during Guided Reading.

Here was our story of the week.  We read it each day and went over different features of text (pointing out high frequency words, looking at different types of punctuation, discussing the main characters, etc.)

As a follow-up activity to our book of the week on Friday, we made our weekly writing piece a continuation of the story by writing what we would have done if we were the main character (i.e. "Why did we cross the road?")

 We changed our Drama Centre into a Shape BBQ Restaurant.

 We played Shape Bingo!

We also learned about more complex 2-D shapes (rhombuses, trapezoids, hexagons, etc.) with this fun shape game!

As our book of the week was rhyming book, we discussed what makes two words rhyme and what does not through this fun computer game during Circle Time!

Here are our popcorn words of the week!

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton


Happy 2015!

I hope everyone had a restful and enjoyable Winter Break.

Here are some things we did during our first week back.

Here are the three popcorn words we worked on.

Here are some of the books that we read during Circle Time.  Some of these books touched upon the monthly character trait for January (Team Work) while others talked about shapes, our current unit in Math.

Here was our poem of the week.  During Circle Time, we circled other popcorn words we knew as a quick review.

We finished our measurement unit by creating small structures and measuring them using standard units (centimetres).

Here was a shape game that we played at the Computer Centre.

We also continued with our guided reading, did our weekly Writers' Workshop piece (topic: "What I Love About School"), reviewed our monthly calendar, and created beautiful drawings at our Art Centre!

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton






Hello All,

Unfortunately, my camera phone is giving me some trouble and as a result, I am unable to upload any photos.

Here is a brief description about what has been going on in our class this past week:

We continued our unit on measurement by measuring distance.

In order to do this, each student made and decorated a paper airplane of their own and took it flying.  They enjoyed measuring how many footsteps their plane went and recorded their best distance on a piece of paper.  These experiments were conducted in the back schoolyard and in the gym.  Their work is being displayed outside of our classroom as our new display board.

We also conducted an experiment with balance scales to continue our study of mass.

I put a little toy car on one side of the balance scale and asked the students to draw how many magnetic letters it would take to outweigh the toy car.  The students had fun drawing their own version of the balance scale in their "Thinking Books", making a prediction, and waiting to see if their predictions were correct!

We also worked on writing holiday cards to one another as our writing task for the week.  All of the students enjoyed decorating their cards and writing a special message to a friend!

We talked about the different holidays people celebrate in December and read and watched a short educational film about Hanukkah.

We also reviewed the vowels in the alphabet during Circle Time and Mrs. Prashad helped students work on their Alphabet Folders.

Some of our Seniors got a special treat for Guided Reading as we have a new set of leveled books that came in this week.  I will finish with the remaining SK's and all of the JK's this coming week.

Of course, we also rehearsed our songs for the Winter Concert.

The Winter Concert is on Thursday, December 18th at 6:30 p.m.

Please bring your child to our classroom at 6:00 p.m. in order for us to warm up.

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton

December 1st-4th, 2014

Hello All!

Here are some photos of what's been going on in our classroom this during this past week.

We made winter scenes with cotton, white chalk and blue construction paper.  Great job, everybody!

I read "I Play Soccer" with the SK's and "The Noisy Book" with the JK's for our Guided Reading sessions.  The Noisy Book covers the primary sound that each letter in the alphabet makes.  I have included some of the student's guided reading entries above.

We got a light cube for our class this week!  The students had fun examining different types of animal x-rays.  This was a very popular centre!

A student in our class had a loose tooth.  This was a perfect opportunity to read "The Wibbly Wobbly Tooth", a story about a boy who has a loose tooth and talks about it with his class.

At the end of the book, the child throws his tooth on the roof.  As an extension, we read parts of the book "Throw Your Tooth on the Roof", which teaches children about what children around the world do when they loose a tooth!

Here is what some of our students built at the Building Centre this week.

While reading our poem of the week, "Snowflakes", we tried to spot and circle all of the popcorn words that we know.  Way to go!

One of our students created a beautiful work of art and encouraged others to try their hand in the same fashion.  Beautiful!

In keeping with the theme of Kindness and Caring (December's character trait), we read this book which talks about what it means to be a good friend.

As part of a measurement activity, the students drew something on a post-it that they believe is heavier than an apple and then placed it on the balance scale drawn on the chart paper.  It was a lot of fun!

Mrs. Prashad also continued working on our students' alphabet booklets and we rehearsed our songs for the winter concert.

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton








November 2014

Hello All,

Here are some photos of what we have been up to for November!

We have been practicing our number recognition skills with Number Bingo during Learning Centre Time!

 Here is one of the books we read during Guided Reading!

 As the character trait for November is "empathy", we did a fun activity with the classic book, "Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day".

The students were given the task to think about what they would say to Alexander to make him feel better about the bad day that he was having.

Scroll down below to see what our students came up with!

Our SK's wrote about Remembrance Day.

Here are some photos of our first snowfall of the season!  Winter has come early and our students could not have been more excited to go for a walk yesterday to soak it all in!

The students made their own "Living Things" game.

We talked about the basic characteristics of living things (i.e. need food/water, grow, etc.)  The students then took old holiday cards and cut out living things that they saw in them, such as people, plants, animals.  Then, they pasted them into a picture and wrote down how many living things they put in their picture.  Then, they covered the number with a small post-it note.  These pictures are now displayed around our classroom so that each student can view his/her classmate's picture and see if he/she can find all of the living things in each picture.  It was a lot of fun!

Here are some collages that our students made from old National Geographic magazines.

Each student has now written what their collage is about.  I will post their write ups next week.

Here are some more books that we read during Story Time.

The last one, "Mr. Grump", touched upon the theme of "empathy".  At the end of the story, we learned that all Mr. Grump needed was a kind word or two to feel happy again!

The Block Centre continues to be a popular one.  The students are always asking me to take photos of what they have made.

I like to use this opportunity to challenge their thinking and see if they can demonstrate some of their knowledge on the math strands we have covered so far.  Some questions I might ask in this regard may be, "How many blocks did you use to make your structure?", or "Do you see a colour/shape pattern in your structure?"


October 20th-24th, 2014

Hello All,

Here are some photos of things we did last week in the classroom.

Our poem of the week was "1, 2, Buckle My Shoe".  We practised this poem by completing the activities seen above during Circle Time and Learning Centre Time.

We read "The Gingerbread Man" and compared it to one of our class's favourite books "The Runaway Pancake".  We talked about how these two stories were "similar" and "different".  The students had some great ideas.  They included the following:

-both the pancake and the gingerbread man were eaten by the same animal (the fox)
-both stories began with the characters (pancake and gingerbread man) running out of the oven
-both stories had different animals and people chasing the main characters
-one was about a gingerbread man and one was about a pancake
-one only had an old woman (Runaway Pancake) at the beginning and the other had an old man and an old woman at the beginning (Gingerbread Man)

As a follow up activity, I put smaller copies of "The Gingerbread Man" at the Drawing Folder Centre and let the students draw their favourite part of the story.

 Here are some of the stories I read with the Guided Reading Groups this week.

Some students challenged themselves by building snap cube towers as tall as they could and then trying to count the number of snap cubes that they used.

 The students made some marvelous creations using cones and cylinders at the Sand Table!

 The students had fun challenging themselves when completing the broken number lines!

The story sequencing game remains a big hit in our class.  This centre provided an opportunity for the students to use the words "First", "Then", "After", and "Finally" when describing the order of events.

 Some of the students wanted to change our Home Centre into a fire station.  We decided to call it "Fire Station 40" and did up a job's list of the fire fighters working at the station.

 The students liked playing at this centre, which is based off of the book "Chicka Chicka".

We also did Writers' Workshop by putting the three popcorn words of the week ("we", "are", and "for") in a sentence, rehearsed the song "We Are Responsible" for our performance at the Character Trait Assembly, and worked in small math groups during Quiet Centre Time.

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton

Hello All,

My apologies for not updating this page sooner.

Below, you will see some of the things we have done during the first weeks of school for our class.

Some of the activities that we have done in our class will not be seen here as photos for them have not been taken.

These activities include small reading groups, small writing groups, small math group activities and outdoor play.

Therefore, this section of the blog serves as a highlight of just some of the activities that take part in our daily classroom schedule.

Mid-September to Mid-October 2014

Every morning, the students are expected to sign their name on the Sign-In sheet, find their name tag, change their book bags, and read quietly until morning Circle Time.

Our students are learning to do this very quickly and are getting lots of important practice recognizing and writing their names!

As you can see, we get a lot of use out of our chart stand!

I do a morning message with the class each day.  This activity gives our students important opportunities to cover concepts such as the date, sentence structure, and recognizing high-frequency words (or "popcorn words").

I also try to incorporate the concepts that we are covering in Math into most of our daily morning messages.

At Learning Centre Time, students are free to use my pointers and try to read what has been posted on the chart stand.  Sometimes I leave the morning message for them, other times I leave the poem of the week, and some days I leave a math activity that we went over as a class during Circle Time.

In this last photo, you can also see that we also covered the concept of "living" and "non-living" things, which is a science expectation in our curriculum.  The students loved playing this game with each other during Learning Centre Time.

We loved the book "Chicka, Chicka", which helped us in our review of upper case and lower case letters.  As a follow up to this activity, our unit on patterning, and our trip to Pingle's Apple Farm, our students made their own colourful apple trees.

When all of the trees were complete, our students shared their apple trees during Circle Time and explained the colour pattern core that they created (e.g., "purple, blue, green", "red, orange", etc.)

In addition, we also did a small patterning activity during Learning Centre Time.  In the patterns seen above, the students were asked to identify the pattern core after they completed their pattern.

Here are some photos from our trip to Pingle's Apple Farm!  We had a great time learning about the different types of apples you can grow and the correct way to pick an apple off of the tree ("Eye to the sky, the apples come off easy as pie!") and also visiting some of the animals that live on the farm!

I hope our students got to share some of their apples with you.  They were quite tasty!

As you can see, our students have had an opportunity to participate in a variety of literacy-based activities.  The key concepts that we have focused on with these activities include: telling the difference between letters and numbers, creating high-frequency words and our names in a variety of ways, making upper case and lower case letters, and identifying both upper and lower case letters (e.g., linking an upper case letter 'S' with a lower case letter 's').

The students also had fun getting their hands dirty with my homemade play dough!

After we played the game "Which Has More?" during Circle Time (see above picture), our students were able to play their own sorting game during Learning Centre Time.  During Circle Time, we sorted the pictures by "living" and "non-living" things.

During Learning Centre Time, the students were allowed to sort the pictures by any way they wanted.

Some chose to sort by "living" and "non-living", others sorted by things they liked and things they did not like, some sorted by things they thought were "silly", while others sorted by things that they thought would float in water and things that they thought would not float in water.

Our Building Centre is very popular!

In addition to building castles, houses, cars, etc.  I asked the students to try creating a structure with a pattern.  Some chose to use colour patterns in their structures, while others used shape patterns.

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton


November 2014

Hello Everybody!

Here are some photos from the last couple of weeks.

These are some of the books that we read in our guided reading groups.

I have included some pictures of the students' responses to these books.

The students started creating flags at our art centre and we took this opportunity to talk and learn about different flags from around the world.  It was a great chance to see what the students knew about other countries and to share what they knew with each other!

We started a new unit on Measurement.  The students had fun comparing the mass of various objects using balance scales (which were also placed in the water table).  As you can see, the students were posed with a question.  They would write down their guess and then test out their predictions at this centre.

We also explored measuring width and height using rulers and metre sticks.  Here are some pictures of the structures that the students made.  As you can see, we also incorporated some literacy into these centres by labeling some of the features of our structures.

We read a book called animal clues.  This book showed a close-up of the different body parts of various animals and then had the reader guess the animal.

We made our own book in a similar vein.  Can you guess who's who?

We also had a lot of fun playing in our very own winter wonderland!

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton


January 19th - January 30th, 2015

Hello All,

Here are some things we did in our classroom over the past two weeks.

In connection with the art project we were working on, the students wrote about their favourite building in the imaginary town we created out of recyclable materials.

I have put a copy of the Fry 100 Sight Words ("popcorn words") in each student's writing folder for a quick reference when writing.  We talked about how words are placed in alphabetical order which will help them search this page for a word they wish to use in their writing.

Here are some of the big books and guided reading books that we read.

Our big books have served as great opportunities to discuss basic concepts of print, reviewing punctuation, and pointing out our "popcorn" words.

Here is a shape game we played at Learning Centre Time which also helped us with sentence structure.

Here are the materials we decorated to look like different buildings.  In addition to reviewing the names of different 3-D shapes, we also sounded out and wrote the names of each different building at this centre.

Here are some creations we made out of 2-D shapes.

The students enjoyed creating different vehicles (boats, cars, spaceships, trucks, etc.) out of lego.  We spent a lot of time during Show and Share Time discussing what we made and using our imagination about where these vehicles could take us!

Here are the "popcorn" words we studied over the past two weeks.

At the Playdough Centre, some students tried making some words that they knew.

We had a lot of fun at our new sensory centre, the Snow Table!

Here is our Shape Art Wall!

Stay posted for more!

-Mr. Ashton