It was quite a party today at our dance-a-thon!

 Today we read Anansi's Party Time

In yesterday's story Turtle tricked Anansi. 

Anansi wanted to trick Turtle back. Ask your child if it worked.

Our baby plants are ready for their own homes! (see January 17th post)

Look at the roots! They are ready for soil.

We made our observations and then planted our plants in the pots we painted.

I'll post a picture of all of our potted plants once we finish.

 AHPS Community Kitchen Party! Kitchen Party :  /'kɪtʃɪn/  /'pɑ:tɪ/

“The Canadian Kitchen Party is a warm hug of welcome, a song shared amongst newfound friends, a communal meal, colourfully illustrated with local characters, storytellers and more.” Food brings people together. It is an expression of where we come from and where we are. We connect to our culture with food, we connect to other cultures through trying new flavours, we connect to each other through sharing a meal.

The staff at Aurora Heights PS would like to invite our community to get to know each other a little better through a virtual Kitchen Party. We will be collecting stories of food traditions and recipes from our community to compile into one book. This book will be available this spring for families to have their own copy to help us all learn more about our community.

We would love to hear about the food traditions from your family! Please fill out the form linked below by March 29th to include your family in the AHPS Community Kitchen Party Book!

Click Here To Submit a Story and Recipe to the AHPS Community Kitchen Party

Here is an example of what your page in the book might look like (Thanks Mia!):

Building off of our presentation last week we are reading tales of Anansi this week.

Anansi is a trickster! 

But Turtle turns the tables and tricks Anansi!

We are describing Anansi...

Anansi is a tricker

Anansi is a web maker

 What an exciting and fun morning!

We had the pleasure of welcoming Kesha Christie to our school. She was a very engaging storyteller who told us stories about Anansi the Spider. To continue this learning, we will be reading more Anansi tales next week! 

 Our sound of the week is /y/

Our Fairy Tale this week is Hansel and Gretel

Ask your child - "How were Hansel and Gretel courageous and clever?"

 

We had a star reader read our whole morning message!

We are all getting better and better at reading sight words like; it, and, the, you, is

Keep looking for these words as you read at home.

Each day, as we are getting settled after lunch we "look in" on different animals often in their natural habitat. Today we were looking at deer and I asked "Where do you think the deer are?"

"I think they are in Snowball because my grandma and grandpa live there and they see deer at their house."

"I think they are in Barrie because there is snow in Barrie."

This is great thinking!

 Today we read The Princess and the Peas.

This one was quite different from the others, but we still were able to find similarities.

Thankful Thursday

I love the picture with this one!

 Today we read The Tossy-Turny Princess and the Pesky Pea

This story gave us lots of ideas for what to do if you can't sleep.

We continue to work on estimation.

We looked at pictures like this one and we talked about whether we thought the number was closer to five or ten.

"I think its closer to ten because I see a lot of acorns."

Two days in one! Our tale this week is The Princess and the Pea

Yesterday I was out of the classroom. Ms. Rummenie started the week off with The Penguin and the Pea.

Today we read Rachel Isadora's telling of the tale.

The Princess has so much trouble sleeping! What do you do if you have trouble sleeping?

"I think happy thoughts."

"I check my bed for lumps."

For Tuneful Tuesday we kept working on songs we know. For our song "I like to play the sticks", we are starting to use specific rhythms when we play our sticks.

We are learning to read music too!

Ask your child to read these rhythms.

(Hint - ta - ta - ti-ti - ta and ti-ti - ta - ti-ti - ta)

In Math we are learning about estimation. Estimation is a very valuable skill to have.

Today we tried estimating how many blocks were in this bag.

We didn't get to look at the bag for very long and then we made our estimations - or guesses.

First we decided on a number that was too small.

Then one that was two big.

Once we had our brackets, so to speak, we made our estimates.

I was very impressed with our estimates! 

Then we counted to check our estimates.

You can practice estimating at home.

About how many shoes are at the door?

How many socks do you think are in your drawer?

 Fun Friday!

That means Elephant and Piggy!

Our focus in math this week was symmetry.

Ask your child what makes something symmetrical? Can you find anything symmetrical at home?

 Today we read The Three Snow Bears

How does a different setting change a story?

Tuneful Tuesday!

For /ch/ week we learned a song about a train - CHOO CHOO! We used shakers to make the train sounds as we sang. (chugga chugga....)

We read Goldy Luck and the Three Pandas.

Goldy Luck gets lucky for Lunar New Year. Ask your child about this story.

In math we looked at these four shapes and talked about which one doesn't belong with the others.

We came up with five different answers and all of them were right! 

Ask your child which one doesn't belong and why? 

Hint - each one doesn't belong depending on the attribute you are looking at.

 Our sound of the week this week is /ch/

Our fairy tale of the week is Goldilocks and the Three Bears.

We are learning about opposites

hot - cold

big - small

hard - soft

We are working on our mapping skills (early coding).

We are mapping out the steps of the story of Goldilocks and the Three Bears.