January 23-27, 2023

Report Cards will be available through your MyCBE account on January 30, 2023. Report Cards are strength based and focus on six areas of learning; communication, functional academics, regulation, social interactions, leisure skills and functional living skills. Learning activities in our EES classroom are specifically designed to build foundational skills in these areas. Our blog this week will highlight each area and give different examples of the programming to assist families in understanding their students report card.  

Students are also supported through their Individual Program Plan (IPP). Students will have brought their IPP's home on Friday. In the envelope are two copies of the IPP. Please sign one and return to the school. 

Communication - Supporting communication occurs continuously throughout the day from the very moment students step off the bus to getting back on the bus at the end of the day! Communication is all about the sending and receiving messages with others. Students are supported to develop communication skills in many ways through the use of classroom visuals, adult modelling communication, to the use of assisted communication both high tech and visual boards.  Our classroom has an AAC (Augmented and Assisted Communication) device with WordPower available for student use throughout the day. Students are being supported to use this device during shared learning and individual work tasks. 

Functional Academics - Students engage in functional academics through a variety of individual and shared learning tasks. Students are greeted every morning with work tasks set out on tables. These specially designed tasks focus on literacy skills, math skills, learning readiness skills, and help to support concepts introduced in shared learning . Literacy tasks develop skills in letter and sound recognition to reading comprehension and preprinting skills to functional writing. Readiness skills focus on put-in tasks and errorless matching tasks. These tasks focus on fine motor skills, academic communication, and work to increase students stamina for task demands. Math and numeracy tasks work to build number recognition, one to one correspondence and math concepts. Each table group is supported by an adult, and tasks range from familiar and practiced to introducing new concepts.  Students also participate in daily shared learning through songs, movements, interactive SmartBoard activities and inquiry learning. 

Regulation- Students participate in daily regulation. This ranges from daily check-ins using the 4 Zones of Regulation (Green, Red, Blue, Yellow) to activities to support student regulation. Students learn how to identify, in themselves and others, how they are feeling and the different tools they can use to re-regulated or get back into the green zone. Tools such as using fidgets while in shared learning, special areas for calming, big body movements, and different breathing techniques are used and practiced everyday, 

Social Interactions - Students spend time throughout the day building social interaction skills through a variety of activities such as group table play, buddy activities, turn taking games and shared learning.  Character traits are taught through the teaching of The 7 Sacred Grandfathers.  Each character trait is paired with an animal. Students learn and practice actions and behaviours that demonstrate how to be respectful like the buffalo, loving like the eagle, wise like the beaver, humble like the wolf, courageous like the bear, honest like the Sabe, and truthful like the turtle through songs, stories, and peer modelling. 

Leisure Skills - Students get time each day to participate in activities of interest.  Often preferred toys, sensory or movement activities are used as motivators using first/then language.  When students come into the classroom in the morning they FIRST complete three work tasks and THEN engage in preferred activities. Students participate in daily outdoor playground play, exploratory play, introduced to a variety of equipment in the gym and engage in whole group music instruction with our music teacher to further develop leisure skills. 

Functional Living Skills - These are skills that are developed through consistent daily routines that assist students with functional tasks. Building independence in self-care skills is an important part of our day. These skills include dressing during our arrival and dismissal routines, hygiene skills (hair and teeth), increased mobility, snack and lunch routines, and support with toileting skills. During community walks, students learn important safety skills and learn about environmental print, such as safety and road signs.  Learning about days of the week and months of the year through our daily calendar work also supports functional living skills. 

I hope this blog helps you to understand the learning outcomes in your students report card and IPP. Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. I look forward to further discussing your students school successes! Stay warm this weekend!

Upcoming Dates

• Jan 30: Term 1 Report Cards released through your MyCBE Account.
• Feb 2: Winter Walk Day (see below)
• Feb 3: CBE Non-Instructional Day (no classes)
• Feb 16 & 17: Teachers' Convention (no classes)

Report Cards

• Your child's report card will be available online starting on Monday January 30.
• To see the report card you must log into your MYCBE Account. 
• Contact your child's teacher if you have any issues.

Winter Walk Day - February 2

Ethel M. Johnson School is planning on participating in the Alberta Winter Walk Day, Thursday, February 2, 2023.  Walking is a great way to enjoy a beautiful winter day.  We will walk outside around the block, on the sidewalk, weather permitting.  Students are asked to dress for the weather to enjoy the fresh, crisp Alberta air (i.e. coats, mitts, boots and snow pants).

Calgary Roughnecks Tickets

We are pleased to share that students will have the opportunity to experience lacrosse, Canada's official summer sport later this month. The program is through the Roughnecks and they have provided two free tickets to a game in February for each family!  Next week teachers will be sending home (a code) to redeem two free tickets. Stay tuned!

January 16-20, 2023

 

This week we continued our Space Inquiry with a focus on learning about the Sun. We introduced students to listening and reading informational text on PebbleGo. Our focus learning is that the sun is a star and all the planets in our solar system revolve around the sun. 

Students engaged in learning tasks with a space theme. These tasks target skill development set out in students IPP's such as reading comprehension, fine motor and preprinting, letter recognition, matching, and math concepts like probability, ordering, and patterning. 

Report Cards will be released in your MyCBE January 30, 2023. Student report cards will focus on six learning areas; communication, functional academics, regulation, social interactions, leisure skills and functional living skills.  Students build on these skills in various activities throughout the day. Next weeks blog will focus on each of these important areas. Here is a sneak peak of some of the activities that will be highlighted. 

This Sunday will begin the 15 Day celebration of the Lunar New Year. Students started to learn about the celebrations and traditions associated with this celebration through a visual core vocabulary board, songs, stories and movement.  We started our learning with The Dragon Dance. Click the link to see the dance. https://youtu.be/i2l9p0fmFSU. This upcoming week we will learn more about the Lunar New Year and The Year of the Rabbit. 

Your student's IPP (Individual Program Plan) will be coming home this upcoming week. There will be two copies, one for you to keep, and one to sign and return. Please feel free to reach out to me if you have any questions. 

Upcoming Dates

• Jan 30: Term 1 Report Cards released through your MyCBE Account.
• Feb 2: Winter Walk Day (see below)
• Feb 3: CBE Non-Instructional Day (no classes)
• Feb 16 & 17: Teachers' Convention (no classes)

Winter Walk Day - February

Ethel M. Johnson School is planning on participating in the Alberta Winter Walk Day tomorrow, Thursday, February 2, 2023.  Walking is a great way to enjoy a beautiful winter day.  We will walk outside around the block, on the sidewalk, weather permitting.  Students are asked to dress for the weather to enjoy the fresh, crisp Alberta air (i.e coats, mitts, boots and snow pants).

January 9 - 13, 2023

Welcome back! I hope everyone had a great break. This week was all about getting back into our daily routine. Thankfully the weather was so much nicer than when we left for our break in December, that we got to enjoy lots of time outdoors this week as well!

Students were greeted Monday morning with some new morning work. Most of our morning work has a Winter based theme. Students work in different table groups on targeted tasks.  Many of the tasks are designed to focus on goals set in each students Individual Program Plan (IPP).

After completing three tasks students are given the opportunity to engage in some free choice play. One of the choices after task work is completed is our Movement Room. Students can bounce on the trampoline, crawl through the tunnel, walk on the bench, throw balls at the target, rock in the recliners, walk on the stepping stones, or use the body sock.  This room is among our students favourite!

This week we returned to our weekly library visits. Our visits to the library start with our librarian, Mrs. B, reading us one of her favourite stories. After the story, students are supported to choose a library book and then sign it out. Library books are kept in the classroom for the week and students can revisit their book as often as they like. 

During our literacy whole group learning we continue to build our sound and letter knowledge. This week we looked at the digraph /th/. Here is one of the videos we watched to learn more about the digraph. https://youtu.be/o3INXFPrfJM. Students are learning to differentiate sounds that are voiced or unvoiced by feeling the vibrations in the throat. Words like moth and thumb have an unvoiced sound, meaning that if we put our hand on our throat we don't feel a tickle (vibration), where words like feather and weather the /th/ sound is voiced, we feel the vibrations. 

This week we also started a new inquiry learning topic, Our Solar System. This week we learned about the job of an Astronaut. 

Students started an art project this week that we will finish up next week. We also introduced one of our fun space sensory bins. 

Upcoming Dates

• Jan 17: Student Council & Parent Society Meeting (virtual @ 6 pm)
• Jan 17 or 18: Community Walk, weather permitting
• Jan 19: Health Hunger/Fun Lunch (Deadline to order is Jan 14)

• Jan 30: Term 1 Report Cards released through your MyCBE Account

Have a wonderful weekend!

December 12-16, 2022

 

I can't believe we are getting so close to the end of 2022! Only 4 more days remain until our Winter break. This week students worked hard on demonstrating some growing independence in both academic and free choice tasks. 

This week students continued building on math concepts from last week. Students completed activities that focused on sorting different shapes. Activities that require students to cut around and paste various objects also helps to further develop their fine motor skills. Our students also completed their December colouring journal page.

Students explore many types of play throughout the day like supported play, social play and independent play. Each type of play helps to build different skills. Supported play helps to build skills like communication or developing a new skill set while social play helps build skills like turn-taking, patience and sharing. Our focus for this week was on independent play.  Independent play does not mean unsupervised play. In independent play the student is engaging in activity without the interference from an adult.  Independent play helps to foster  imagination and creativity, promote problem-solving, learn more about your own interests, and maintain self-regulation. 

Next week we look forward to having some fun for the last week before our break. We will be learning more about the Winter Solstice, with the story Goodbye Autumn, Hello Winter, and festive activities that celebrate the season. We respect everyone's religious and cultural beliefs and family traditions, if you have any questions about activities that your child might participate in, like reading the story Pete the Cat Saves Christmas, writing a letter to Santa, or you would like to share some traditions that are important to your family around this time, please feel free to reach out to me rlmyroniuk@cbe.ab.ca. Please take note of the Holiday Fun Days that the whole school will be participating in.

Holiday Fun Days: 

December 19 – Festive Hat day 

December 20- Ugly sweater day 

December 21- Winter Solstice Day  

December 22- PJ day  

Upcoming Dates

• Dec 15 - Healthy Hunger Lunch (Mucho Burrito)
• Dec 15 - Gingerbread House Decorating Night
• Dec 22 - Last day of classes (8:00 am to 2:30 pm)

December 5-9, 2022

This week students were greeted with new morning table tasks, celebrating different winter festivities.  During this time, the students continue to further develop skills in the areas of task independence, task stamina, fine motor, communication and academics.  Students are supported to complete three or more targeted tasks before moving onto a high interest activity, an activity that they are working for. Skills such as colour recognition, one-to-one number correspondence (counting each object in a set), visual  discrimination (the ability to detect differences and sort objects accordingly), letter and word recognition are just a few of the skills being targeted this week. 

 

Students gather together multiple times a day in whole group shared learning, our circle times.  Every shared learning starts with a choice regulation activity, this activity is meant to prepare our bodies and brains for learning. These activities focus on calming movement, breathing strategies, and activities to enhance focus. After our regulation, students are reminded of learning expectations with our group plan and whole body listening.

 Monday and Wednesdays our focus for our shared learning is on building reading readiness with activities such as developing a greater understanding of our Sound Wall (see previous posts for more information).  Tuesday and Thursdays the focus shifts to our number sense and math concepts. We start our circle time with a choice of number songs that target counting by 1's, 2's, 5's and 10's. Then we participate in our interactive number talk. Students are shown a number on a dice, currently numbers 1-12, and we practice the multiple ways that we can represent that number in words, on a number line, using tens frames, in quantity, and with place value.  Students have been learning about 2D shapes and patterns. Next week we will learn about 3D shapes and continue working with the shapes in various patterns. 

Students were excited to get to enjoy time outside on our playground equipment. Next week, we will go on another community walk on December 13 or 14, weather permitting. 

Upcoming Dates

• Dec 10 - Deadline to order for Dec 15 Healthy Hunger Lunch (Mucho Burrito)
• Dec 13 or 14 - Community Walk - weather permitting
• Dec 15 - Gingerbread House Decorating Night
• Dec 22 - Last day of classes (8:00 am to 2:30 pm)

Festive Days Ahead

• Some of our Grade 6 students have taken a leadership role and proposed to their teachers and Ms. Clark and Ms. Elies-Guss. From the 19th to the 22nd there will be theme days.  While participating in the theme day is optional, we are encouraging all to participate!  The days are as follows:
• Dec 19: Festive Hat Day
• Dec 20: Festive Sweater Day
• Dec 21: Winter Solstice - Student are encouraged to wear blue or white
• Dec 22: Pajama Day

Nov 28 - Dec 2, 2022

Brrrrr, was it ever cold this week! We kept warm indoors all week with lots of different learning activities and free choice play. 

This week we introduced our December calendar. Music is incorporated into almost every aspect of our day. The students all love combining music with their learning. Here is another example of how we incorporate music into key learning outcomes, such as with our December calendar song https://youtu.be/XGwIXvG1fjQ. Students are learning the functional skill of how to create a calendar by numbering each day of the week, labeling important personal dates, like our two friends who will celebrate their birthday in December, and other important events as a part of our morning shared learning. 

We are continuing to build our classroom sound wall, working first with the consonants. This week we introduced the sounds /n/ and /m/. Part of our time working with these sounds is learning what our mouths, lips and tongues are doing.  These sounds are highlighted on our classroom mirror, that hangs above our sink. Students are encouraged to practice these sounds while at the sink washing their hands throughout the day. One of the activities that the students enjoy is our interactive sound sorting game. This week they had to sort the sounds onto the different pirate ships. When the correct sound was put onto the correct ship, the pirates fired their cannon! We also continued to learn how to write these sounds using both horizontal and vertical writing surfaces. 

This week we viewed another silent animated short High Diving Giraffes, https://youtu.be/nPrWo5pEvyk. Similar to last week, we followed a predictable writing format. After viewing the video together on the first day, we then brainstormed some vocabulary.  On the second day we watched the video again, highlighting our vocabulary words while watching. We worked on creating different sentences together.  On the next day students used picture symbols, our classroom AAC devices, traditional writing, and typing to create their sentences. The last day after viewing the video, students presented their sentences to the class in our special Authors Chair. During our Author's Chair, our students are also learning how to listen carefully to each other, look at the speaker, and clap appropriately after the author is finished reading their sentence.  

Free choice play is an important part of our program. During play, students are supported by our team in many different ways from regulation to cooperative play. Here is an example of how communication is being supported during play. The student is presented with a preferred toy, enclosed in a container with a see-through lid.  As the student is trying to get into the container, a visual for the word 'help' is shown. The supporting adult might say "it looks like you need help opening?" while emphasizing and pointing to the visual for help. When the student points or visually focuses on the word help, the supporting adult will open the container and the student can access the preferred toy inside. After some time with the toy, the adult will put the toy back into the container and start again. 

Next week we look forward to the weather warming up a bit so we can finally enjoy some outdoor time! 

Upcoming Dates

• Dec 5-8 - Scholastic Book Fair
• Dec 5 - Deadline for Gingerbread House Decorating Night
• Dec 10 - Deadline to donate to Christmas Hampers
• Dec 10 - Deadline to order for Dec 15 Healthy Hunger Lunch (Mucho Burrito)
• Dec 15 - Gingerbread House Decorating Night
• Dec 22 - Last day of classes (8:00 am to 2:30 pm)

Book Fair: December 5-8

• Volunteers Needed: The Library is looking for Volunteers to help out during EMJ’s In-School Scholastic Book Fair 8:30-12:00 noon, Monday, December 5 to Thursday, December 8.
• If you are able to volunteer, please contact Ms. Belisle at cdbelisle@cbe.ab.ca .
• Students will be able to shop and purchase items from the In-School book fair December 5-December 8.
• We will share more information in the weeks ahead for the Online Virtual Book Fair.

November 21 -25, 2022

Thank you to all the families that were able to take time out of their busy schedules to connect during our student conferences. I  really enjoy being able to share your child's progress with you. I am so proud of all the students in room 3. I look forward to connecting with a few more families next week. If you did not have the opportunity to connect, please feel free to reach out and we can arrange a time to meet. These meetings will be held virtually.  

Over the past few weeks we have started creating our classroom Sound Wall. A sound wall is a way to organize and display the different sounds, phonemes, we hear in speech.  Our sound wall highlights what our mouths and tongues are doing when they produce the sound with both real and graphic photos.  During our shared learning we have explored the sounds /p/, /b/, /t/, /d/, /k/, and /g/. During our shared learning students practice making the sounds while some students are using the phonetic alphabet on the AAC device to make the sounds. A sound wall matches our speech sounds to the written representation of the sound, grapheme. On individual whiteboards students are practicing or exploring printing the letter. Another activity that the students really enjoy is our item sort.  In this activity we are showing an item and then isolating the initial sound of that item and sorting it accordingly. We look forward to sharing more of this work with you in future blog posts. 

This week we had some fun during literacy with the Pixar animated short For the Birds, https://youtu.be/Q6X80IWdS6s. After viewing the video, we brainstormed the characters, the setting, and a few of the events that took place in the short. Using our generated list, students created their very own writing. Some students used predictable writing and visual picture symbols to create I see or I liked sentences.  Students then got to share their writing with their classmates in our special Authors Chair. 

This week we took advantage of the beautiful weather to go on a community walk. Before the walk, we read a social story about crosswalk safety and then watched a video about how to safely cross the road. During our walk we pointed out the different street signs and talked about their meanings. Next week some of our morning tasks will focus on the different environmental print we can see all around us. We walked to a nearby community playground and had lots of fun playing on the different play structure. 

If you are looking for a way to give during this holiday season, please think about supporting our community hamper. If you have any questions please do not hesitate to reach out to me. 

The predicted forecast for next week might have us enjoying more activities indoors. We still try to get outside whenever possible, even for short periods of time. Keeping to our routines and schedule helps some of us stay regulated throughout the day. We will continue to take outdoor breaks until the temperature drops to -20 degrees with the windchill, so please be sure to pack extra's hats, mitts and socks for the cold weather.  With all the extra's around the classroom, please take a moment to label your students belongings. This is greatly appreciated! 

Upcoming Dates

• Dec 2 - Community Walk, weather permitting
• Dec 5-8 - Scholastic Book Fair
• Dec 5 - Deadline for Gingerbread House Decorating Night
• Dec 10 - Deadline to donate to Christmas Hampers
• Dec 10 - Deadline to order for Dec 15 Healthy Hunger Lunch (Mucho Burrito)
• Dec 15 - Gingerbread House Decorating Night
• Dec 22 - Last day of classes (8:00 am to 2:30 pm)

Have a great weekend!