Mrs. McPhail's Grade One Class: St. Patrick's Day and Other Things

First of all, allow me to apologize for the lack of posts lately! Things have been very busy with assessments, report card preparation and getting ready for Student Led Conferences (which are this Tuesday and Wednesday from 4-6:30)!

This is what we've been up to:

In ELA we have been learning all about the "Bossy R" sounds (ar, or, ir, er, ur). We practice reading and spelling words, tell stories to help us remember what the sounds are, go on word hunts and make word houses.
We are beginning to learn another reading comprehension strategy called Inferring. Good readers use clues from the text (the words and pictures) plus their own knowledge (new word: "schema"!) and try to figure out what the author is trying to show us. This week we will be doing a special "investigation" to practice our inferring skills.
We worked on our retelling skills when we were reading St. Patrick's Day stories this past week. A good retelling includes telling the title of the story, describing what happens at the beginning, middle and end, using the character's names during the retelling and making a connection.
We wrote St. Patrick day poems using the poem "March 17th" by Vera Trembach as a model.
Practicing different counting patterns have been keeping us busy in Math. We are working on counting by 2s (to 20), 5s and 10s (to 100). We have also been learning about different subtraction strategies that will help us to be quick and accurate (Subtracting zero, Number Minus Itself, Counting Back and Counting Up).
Students have learned a lot about our brain, lungs and heart. The children are working in pairs to design a poster that represents their learning about things we can do to keep our heart, lungs and brain healthy.
In Art we made pepper print shamrocks.