Nov. 18 - Social Skills / Math Update

In Ms. Ayesha's STEAM group today, the students learned about what is waiting for them as they participate in social skills.....

PIZZA!

After each positive STEAM class, students are able to choose toppings to put onto the pizza. Once the pizza is full, the students will be getting to make their own pizzas for lunch. 

In social skills today, students made their own hand fidgets using a balloon and flour and discussed the benefits of using hand fidgets and how to use them properly.

Math

In Math, students are learning about all of the different strategies that can be used to add and subtract. While we still teach the traditional method of placing numbers over one another and regrouping, we also learn about different ways that we can add or subtract that may make it easier for us to solve problems. We have been thinking about subtract as taking away but also the difference in-between two numbers and how that can help us to solve a problem.
Many students like to break number down into their Place Value when they add or subtract and are becoming comfortable mentally breaking them down in our Math talks that start the class.

Nov. 17 - Predicting!

This week in the Junior class we are working on using the reading strategy of Predicting! We have been reading texts as a class and looking at the context clues to make a prediction about what will happen next.

We started by reading a picture book, The Day the Crayons Quit, to make predictions as to why the crayons would be upset. As an introductory text, students were familiar with ways that the crayons would be used and made some spot-on predictions based on what they know.



We also watched a few clips from a "Good Idea, Bad Idea" video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2dJOIf4mdus) to use context clues from a "Good Idea" to predict what the "Bad Idea" might be and have looked at how we use specific clues from texts that don't have pictures.

Connected to the idea of predicting, students were asked to choose an animal or character (from a video game, movie, or TV show) that they could provide some context clues so that other students would have the opportunity to predict it. We looked at providing sufficient and precise details when we were doing our writing so that students would have the ability to predict what the object might be. The clues will be hung up with a picture covered of the person / animal so they can check their answer. Here are a few of our classroom examples:

Nov. 10

We've been very busy in the Junior class at Steps the last couple of weeks! Here's a few things that we've gotten up to:

Health

In Health we have been examinig the food that we eat in more detail. After discussing the difference between processed and unprocessed food, we began to look at the actual sugar content in one serving in some of the food that we eat and weighed it out in actual sugar. The results were pretty surprising (and, truth be told, kinda disgusting!). Everyone was pretty grossed out by the amount of sugar that was in a single coke.

Art

We have been talking about Remembrance Day lately with it coming up tomorrow. Along with reading a book about "Flander's Fields" and discussing reasons why we celebrate Remembrance Day, we have also created some works of art with Ms. B. They are located next to our comprehensive "Wall of Honour" that highlights families at Steps who have had a member serve in the military. 

Language - Procedural Writing

Last week we started Procedural Writing and made a list of steps that we needed to do in order to make Pancakes (after we made them in Breakfast Club of course!). This week, we started on Monday with Procedural Writing by creating houses on Minecraft and taking pictures of the various steps. Today, we arranged the pictures in order, added in transition words between the steps and wrote a brief description of what you have to complete in each step. Throughout the week, we will look at including additional details into our writing as students will have the opportunity to describe how to create / do something of their choice.

Here are a few works that students created and their steps: