Month: March 2017

 

This week we welcomed our families to the classroom to share and celebrate learning. Student led conferences were held in an open house format on Thursday.  The Super Kids took their families through many centres sharing their knowledge through games, journals, art, and science.  Students shared the french game they made to learn vocabulary, their art portfolios, their journals, literacy games, math games, and their science projects.  The class was buzzing with excitement and I thank all our the families for taking the time to come, recognizing that the kids practiced sharing, and supporting our classroom community in the process.  On Friday morning, the class was thrilled to talk about our evening at morning meeting and eagerly shared how proud their families are of their progress. 🙂

Do you remember the leprechaun traps from last week?  I’m sure you do since families took home the design process projects at conferences. Well, we had a very sneaky little visitor in our classroom.  Since we didn’t have school on St. Patrick’s Day, the class had to wait until Monday to see if we caught one.  One family even came to the school on the weekend and looked through the window to see if they could tell!  They had flashlights and everything.  Glad the police weren’t driving by!  That could have been an interesting situation. 🙂

We didn’t catch one, but he stepped in the green paint I left out and got footprints all over the floor and tables!  He definitely was in the traps, because chocolates were eaten with wrappers left, lucky charms were scattered, and trap doors were pushed in!  He left us a message on the floor and wrote a poem for us on our chart paper.  Each student got a small pack of smarties in their traps from our visitor because they were so cleaver.  As you can see from the pictures below, many of the kids didn’t even have their jackets and backpacks off yet because they were to excited to see the room!

  

  

 

Our 3/4 buddies also created a design project this month and they invited us to explore their creations.  Their task was to create a carnival game that incorported their science unit on forces. Many of the other 3/4 classes had created games too.  We were invited to play and explore not only our buddies games, but all of the games created.  We had a great time playing the games.  When it was time to go to the gym the class didn’t want to leave.  It was jungle gym day too!

  

    

Spring break is here!  I hope that all of my Super Kids and their families enjoy some time together.  I’ll see them in April.  Boy, this year is flying by.  You know what they say…time flies when you’re having fun. 🙂

 

WARNING!  This post has LOTS of pictures!  I had to document the steps to our design process project and of course our field trip to the Manitoba Children’s Museum.

Our class and the three other 1/2 multiage classes heading to the Manitoba Children’s Museum right here in Winnipeg.  The Super Kids were excited to explore all of the exhibits and learn about the 3Rs in the museum program we were attending. The program focused on sorting materials, talking about the 3Rs, and how we can help our environment.  The students even got to reuse some materials to create and group project.

 

After lunch it was time to explore the exhibits and have fun with our friends.  Thank you to the two parent volunteers that joined us for our trip.  We hope you enjoyed your time with the Super Kids.  The kids had a fantastic day. Many even fell asleep on the bus ride home!

    

This week we designed our leprechaun traps. We read the book “How To Catch A Leprechaun” first.  The link is below.

How To Catch A Leprechaun

The class was eager to dive in, get creative, and test their inventions.  We talked about what every trap needed to have and made a criteria chart to refer to.  Every trap needed to be made out of recyclable materials, needed to fit a leprechaun in it (we made a size reference), have leprechaun bait and had to be colourful to attract them. When presenting to the class we needed to speak clearly, explain our design, and demonstrate how it worked.  We started by bringing in materials to use.  Thank you to every family that provided material for the students to share.  We couldn’t have made them without lots of materials!

 

It turned into a week long adventure!  The students tested their inventions, helped each other, and created their presentations.  Everyone wanted to be on the blog, so here they ALL are!

 

  

Since there was no school on St. Patrick’s Day, the class has to wait until Monday morning to see if they trapped any leprechauns.  While I was at the PD session at our school on Friday, we had a little visitor! I can’t wait to see their reactions!!!!

On top of all of these exciting projects, we also learned a few math games and practiced them with each other so we could use them as a centre for guided math time.

Friday was a professional development day for the staff of our school and others across the division.  I was lucky to be part of an amazing session where many teachers from our school and others got to watch an amazing traditional hoop dancer.  We even got to make a set of hoops for our school.  Then she showed use how to create formations with them.  I can’t believe how difficult it is!  There are no pictures of me trying these complicated moves.  Thank goodness! 🙂

One more week left until spring break.  I look forward to seeing everyone at our open house conferences this week.  See you then.

 

This week the Super Kids learned about the impressionist painter Claude Monet.  We read books about him and watched videos that talked about his inspirations.  Then the class even created their own painting inspired by Monet”s painting called ” The Isle Grande Jatte On The Siene”.

We spent most of Tuesday on our own artwork.  It was a fantastic day!  We worked through each step together focusing on how Monet used short horizontal brush strokes with double loaded brushes.  The students each had their own paint that they could mix to make different shades of colours.  The class learned that Monet didn’t paint a lot blue skies.  He used white, orange and yellow in most of his paintings.  One Super Kid related this fact to a class favourite by Peter H. Reynolds called “Sky Color”.

First the class drew a horizon line and created a hill with pastels.  They then drew a few houses and buildings on the hill.  We talked about how this was in the background so they were to be small and that there needed to be room for the sky. Then the class used short dashes with their paintbrushes to create their skies and fill in the hill.

The plan was to go outside for recess while this step dried, but it was indoor recess!  We made it work. 🙂

Next it was on to painting the river and making sure the class used blue, white, green, and even the colours from the buildings they drew, to show reflections. Mrs. Haines was kind enough to let us each in her classroom at lunchtime.  After lunch we painted to trees and talked about how they are closer so they had to be bigger.  Many kids were hesitant to paint over their paintings.  It took some convincing, but after working through it, they were thrilled with their masterpieces!

 

We can’t wait to share them with our families at our open house conferences coming up very soon!

Did you know that St. Patrick’s Day is next week? Leprechauns are sneaky little guys who like to play tricks on classrooms in our school.  We plan to try and catch one and ask him why. 🙂  The Super Kids dived into designing their traps on Thursday.  It was all they could talk about.  On Monday we plan to start our designs.  Stay tuned! 🙂

 

This week our class has been continuing our Dr. Seuss book study. We even celebrated what would have been his birthday this past Thursday!  The Super Kids enjoyed Seuss themed literacy centres, continued to work on their rhyming writing pieces for our class book, tried green eggs and ham, finished our Seuss art, and even had time to watch a version of “The Lorax”.  It was a very busy day full of laughs.

We started our fish art on Monday after reading “One Fish, Two Fish, Read Fish, Blue Fish”.  Have you ever noticed how Seuss art is whimsical?  We sure did.  The class started the process by looking at a variety of fish that Seuss drew and then sketched our own.

  

Once their sketches were complete, each student outlined their art with sharpie marker.

  

The next day the class painted them with very small paint brushes that could highlight the details they drew.  They picked colours that Dr. Seuss used in his books.

  

 

We created our backgrounds and let them dry.  The next day we cut and pasted our fish onto our backgrounds.  The results are amazing!  We have them displayed in our classroom on our bulletin board.

 

Our Seussville City is now up in the hallway too!  Last week we shared on our blog the creative process that our class went through with Mrs. Haines’ class.  Check it out next time you’re in the school.

The Seuss themed centres were a big hit.  Each table got to cycle through each centre.  Activities included exploring the Seussville website, creating rhyming phrases, graphing goldfish, working on a Seuss puzzle, and reading Seuss books.

 

Do you like green eggs and ham?  We had to try.

We even got to watch a short video of the Dr. Seuss classic “The Lorax”.

It was a great week!  Enjoy your Sunday.  I’ll see all of my Super Kids tomorrow.  Take care.