New Task Boxes for November

Similar to last year, students in CSSI have the opportunity to explore task boxes daily. Task boxes provide an interactive, hands-on way for students to learn basic skills and concepts. Literacy and Numeracy concepts are woven into each task, and problem solving, oral language, visual discrimination and fine motor skills are also reinforced. Students have the opportunity to explore more numeracy-focused task boxes in the morning, and more literacy-focused task boxes in the afternoon. Task boxes are personalized for students, and are developed based on the skill level of students. 

Students were very excited today to see the new task boxes for November. 

Below, you will find examples from our morning Numeracy Task Boxes:

This task box reinforces colour discrimination, number recognition and counting with one-to-one correspondence. 

This task box requires number recognition, counting with one-to-one correspondence, and fine motor skills are reinforced with the action of students rolling play-dough body parts for each worm. 

This task box requires number recognition and visual discrimination skills.

The following task box requires students to recognize numbers to 15, use one-to-one correspondence, but also introduces the ten frame as a new number recognition/counting strategy. 

 This task box requires students to recognize numbers to 10, use one-to-one correspondence for counting, reinforces number printing skills, and helps to strengthen fine motor skills as students must roll and shape leaves out of play-dough to match the number. 

Task boxes are a highlight of the day for our students, and they work so hard at the skills required to complete each box. 

Weekly Reminders:

Tuesday November 5th: Swimming

Monday November 11th: No School-Remembrance Day

*** Please remember that we participate in outside Recess everyday. Please ensure your student comes to school with the appropriate outerwear in order to play outside. 

Name Placemats

To compliment our weekly letter work, students worked on name placemats this week. Each student's placemat contains images of objects that start with the same letter as their name. 

In addition to strengthening fine motor skills by colouring each image, students were encouraged to use their oral communication skills to identify the pictures on their individual placemats. 

For some of the students, we used the images on each placemat to provoke expansion of speech. 

For example: We may ask the question "what do you see?". Students would typically answer with single word answers "robot". We encouraged students to expand their responses to "I see a robot" or "This is a robot".

We can't wait to start using our individualized placemats for snack and lunch time. 

Upcoming Reminders:

Monday October 21st- Picture Day

Tuesday October 22nd- Swimming

Letter P

Every week, we explore a letter. We learn how to print the letter, how to make the letter's sound, and explore words that start with that letter. 

This week, we explored the letter P. 

We began by learning about the letter P during our morning circle routine. Using songs by Sesame Street, ABC Mouse, and Super Simple Songs, we learned all about the letter P. 

We then learned how to print uppercase P on the large whiteboard. Each student then had the opportunity to practice tracing and printing the letter P and identifying and colouring pictures of objects that start with P.  

 

 We then were asked the next day to practice tracing and printing the letter P and identifying objects that begin with P, building upon our knowledge learned the previous day. 

We used our knowledge of the letter P to create a class poster for our alphabet wall. 

Finally, we created a new character for our alphabet scrapbook. "P is for Pig"

Upcoming Reminders:

-Our first therapy swim session will be Tuesday October 8th. Please remember to send your child prepared with their swim gear on Tuesday. 

-Friday October 11th: No School-Professional Development Day

-Monday October 14th: No School-Thanksgiving Holidy

Welcome Back Room 7 Families

Welome back! 

We are so happy to have our Room 7 learning community back together after a few months off during the summer. Our classroom staff has remained the same with Jennifer Matiece serving as teacher, and Andreanna Polson, Genevieve McLeod, and Arpine Mylayan comprising our classroom educational support team. We will also continue to be supported by system personnel, specifically a Speech and Language Pathologist, Occupational Therapist, Physical Therapist, Psychologist, and Complex-Needs Strategist. 

During the first few weeks back, we have explored getting re-acquainted with each other by learning and sharing about ourselves. 

During morning desk work, we explored using visual examples to draw simple and more complex self portraits. Students are beginning to add details like ears and eyelashes on their own. 

 We also continued to learn printing our names independently, an important skill in order to take ownership of our hard work. 

After practicing self-portraits with visual examples, we applied that skill to larger portraits using verbal cues. 

Building upon our skill of portrait drawing, and independent name printing, we created self-identifying portraits. This activity also allowed us the opportunity to use multi-media, including drawing pencils, tempura paint, and oil pastels. 

We then used oil pastels again to create fun, whimsical and abstract portraits, where we could use any colours that we chose. We continued to build on our drawing skills by adding bodies, arms and sometimes legs. 

We also explored our unique families. Using our new drawing skills, we traced, copied or drew our families independently. We then used popsicle sticks to create a 3-D effect on our family houses. 

Classroom Reminders:

*No School: Friday September 26th: Professional Development Day

*Please look inside your child's home folder as important information regarding our upcoming swimming trips went home today.

*Have a great weekend!