Working together to solve

The children in this room are amazing! They know how to teach each other so well. They can share ideas and help each other understand concepts. We have been using that strength to our advantage and solving non routine math problems together. It is a lot of fun!

 Kids + Math = fun! 

Teaching with the drum

Richelle  came back today and brought her drum. We learned so much from her. We talked about Mother Earth and nature. Richelle told us that there is so much to learn from nature. That is how people learned and taught their children long ago - through stories about nature. People respected nature and nature gave Them all that they needed to live. We thought it sure would be good to listen to those teachings and make respect an important part of our lives-respect for nature, each other and our world. 

Marshmallow snowballs

We read a story called The Mitten by Jan Brett. In the story a bunch of animals crawl into a lost mitten for warmth. The mitten buldges and stretches but Baba's knitting holds together. We made predictions about if we thought the mitten could hold any more animals and estimated how many we thought it would take to fill the mitten right up.  We also discussed why we thought this was fiction and different elements of the story. After we were done we used estimation skills to predict how many "snowballs" we could fit into our mittens...but not real snowballs... The kids knew they would melt and absorb making our mittens soggy. So we used fictional snowballs-mini marshmallows. First we lined up five marshmallows to use as a referent for our prediction. Then we counted by five and wrote our estimates down. After that the children filled the mitten being careful not to leave spaces. Finally they removed the marshmallows and grouped them into tens. They counted the actual amount, recorded it and compared their estimate to the actual number. Then they got to eat a few snowballs! 

Drumming

We had a special guest visit us. Her name was Richelle Scott and she is the indigenous educator for our school division. We have been talking about our ancestors and how stories are passed on to teach lessons. She brought her drums and showed us how songs and stories can be used to teach and how the drum can calm us down. She will be coming two more times to teach about drumming. 

Log House Mouse

We finished our first chapter book. The main characters were Jason and Cheeks and a villain named Slinker! It was full of suspense. The children were so eager to hear the next chapter each day. Listening to a chapter book has helped  the kids increase their comprehension and reading stamina. They learned many new literary techniques(character development, plot development, foreshadowing, using similes and metaphor. They loved it!

 

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas to all!

We had an amazing day! We investigated candy canes using our 5 senses. We had a beautiful and fun sing along in the gym. We made gift bags and wrapped our presents and  cleaned the room and finally had a huge feast. The day ended with some free choice time! What a great way to kick off the holidays. Thank you to all the parents who provided treats! I hope you all have a holiday filled with family, friends and love!! See you in the new year! 

Ginger bread friends!

We have enjoyed a lot stories about gingerbread men in the past few days. Some of the kiddos are writing their own version. One reading group is going to preform the story as a play on Friday for our class. Today we read Gingerbread Friends by Jan Brett. Then we got to make our own gingerbread friends....after that we ate them! Hah! 

Mitten measuring

We have been keeping warm inside these days - learning all about mittens. Mittens are pretty amazing if you stop and think about them. We have talked about the ability of materials to absorb and repel, different types of fabric, wool -where wool comes from and how it is made into mittens. We discussed symmetry. We used that understanding and created a pair of mittens that were detailed, then wrote clues to describe them for our Missing Mitten Mystery. We sorted mittens by pattern and skip counted by two to find out how many we had altogether. We have learned how to make, extend and label patterns and today we used our mittens to measure things around the room. We talked about accuracy and estimation. Some children made very interesting observations about their findings.  They challenged each other to go beyond the given activity and used their findings to compare sizes and problem solve! These are such great children to work with! Their enthusiasm to learn makes my job a joy! I can't wait to see what new things we can discover together next week! 

Our New Year Resolutions

In 2016 we resolve to be proud of ourselves.We reflected on the past year, thought about what we are good at and proud of and then decided what we could do as individuals to improve ourselves. There were many very deep thinkers and they came up with many many unique and creative ideas. As a class we decided to smile more and eat healthy food! Just look at our big smiles!!!! 

Comic life

Today we used a new app called Comic Life to create a comic that explains how we do read to self. We love Daily 5.