October happenings

Family and Healthy Eating

Over the last 2 weeks we have started a unit on family and healthy eating. The Thanksgiving weekend gave us the perfect excuse to talk about the relatives we had visited with and the food we ate. After the weekend I asked the students "What did they think they knew about food?" They had several ideas including that it is healthy for them and it helps them grow. So then I asked "What puzzled them about food?" They came up with 2 main questions that we are now exploring.

Where does food come from?

We are tackling this question first. Earlier in the fall we went to the forest in search of salal berries as there are many salal plants in our neighbouring forest. On Thursday we returned to the forest to look for mushrooms. We set out to count how many we could find and we found over 270! On Friday we returned to the forest as scientists to observe the mushrooms and record what we saw in drawings. We had a fabulous time.

 


We read a non-fiction book about some children on a farm trying to clean out a goat's stall. We also talked about the produce that we can get from farms. 

How is food healthy for our bodies?

We began to explore this question with a quick video about the 5 food groups. Next week we will read books about each food group and sort foods into the food groups. 
We watched a shortened version of this video. 


Families

Along with continuing to explore the questions about food, we will be talking about our home lives. The children will be asked to link household responsibilities (doing dishes, laundry, vacuuming etc) with the family member who does this task. This is part of our careers and social studies curriculum. 

Math

In math we are continuing to count collections every day after lunch. Every day the students are increasing their number sense. We are working on skip counting by 2 and 5. For some children, they are working on accuracy when they count and/ or matching numbers to name of the number. In the next few weeks we will exploring the idea that numbers are made up of 10's and 1's.

If you want to know more about counting and how it relates to the math skills the children will need in the upper grades, I have included the following link:



Tour de Rock

Just some pictures of this special moment for you to enjoy! We did indeed raise enough money so that Grant will shave his head on Monday at our assembly!



Things you can do at home:

These ideas will help support the learning your child is doing in class and give you an idea of what they can do. 
  1. Ask your child what they know about the food on the table and the food groups that they belong to. Talk about the food you eat where you source the food that is on the table.
  2. Talk about the roles and responsibilities that each member has in the home. 
  3. When putting groceries away have you child count the items as they come out of the bags. Is your child counting accurately? Can your child count accurately past 30? 50? Is your child using strategies to count such as grouping things by 2 or 5 or 10? Can your child count independently in French?
  4. Ask about our trip to find mushrooms in the forest and the variety that your child found. 

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