Drumming

We saw the Grade 4s and grade 5s playing songs on special drums.
Drake said: "The performance was awesome!"
Bentley said: "It was great!"
Marcus shared: "They played a monkey song."
Jaxon said: "I heard them say Japanese words."
Lyla said: "It was a good time!"
Jack said: "The fluting was good."

100 Day Celebration

Today we celebrated 100 days of learning in Grade one!  The children did 100 exercises, licked a lollipop 100 times, wrote number sentences for 100, made a snack with 100 pieces of food, built a structure with 100 cups, used an app to see what they would look like at 100 years and worked together to read 100 books.  Happy 100!

      


     

      

   

Day of Play

On February 1st, Linwood School celebrated Global School Play Day.  This day honours the rich learning, creativity and cooperative skills that play fosters.  The students were deeply engaged in their play and imaginations soared.

Assessing Literacy Skills

Grade One is an exciting time of growing and learning. As students progress as readers and writers, signs of learning are evident.

For assessing reading, I observe the children during small group instruction and one-on-one reading conferences to see how they are reading and what they do when they see a new word.  

Signs of growth include:
* reading smoothly so it sounds like spoken language
* going back to re-read when something did not look right, sound right or make sense
* using a variety of strategies to solve new words, such as: re-reading, making the first few sounds, thinking about what makes sense, looking for familiar chunks (sh, ch, th, er, ay) within a word, touching and saying (sounding out), thinking of a word that looks like that (solving"took" by thinking about "look")
* recalling many common words without slowing down to solve them (e.g. they, where, are, you...)
* making connections to the book, asking questions or making predictions about the story

When we engage in a writing project, we offer lots of support and modelling so students can see how a writer thinks about and creates a piece of writing.  Through brief conferences and analyzing their work, progress can be noted and next steps determined.

The students helped create the "What Good Writers Do" chart. Their ideas included:
* writers have a beginning, middle and end
* writers "tell more" (include details)
* writers use describing words
* writers use order words (first, then, next, finally)
* writers leave spaces
* writers start with a capital letter and use lowercase letters for the rest
* writers end sentences with a .  ? or !
* writers look at their word chart or the word wall to spell common words correctly
* writers finger spell new words

If you have any questions about how we assess literacy skills, please feel free to ask for more information.