Festival Du Voyageur, Shadow Charades, and The Olympics

This past week, our school celebrated Festival Du Voyageur with some whole school activities.  What is the Festival Du Voyageur? It’s a local festival that celebrates the French culture and history in Manitoba. Festival games were a highlight.  The kids loved leg wrestling, arm wrestling, sled races, tug of war and much more!

          

Festival crafts with our 5/6 buddies, a pancake lunch, and bannock making kept us busy all week!

          

We ending our week with a special concert with the band “Ca Claque”.  We all couldn’t just sit and listen!  We had to dance. 🙂

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Our classroom had a wonderful time watching and learning about the Olympics over the past few weeks.  The class enjoyed watching Team Canada each morning.  The Super Kids came in each morning eager to see what happened while they were sleeping.

Each morning we would check the medal count, watch highlights, and made our own newscasts!  We tweeted them out and caught the attention of   Team Canada.  Our first few videos got a lot of views, but before long, we had over 12,000 views and supportive comments from all around the world!  The kids think they’re famous.  Check out some of our newscast below.

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Our focus on shadows during our space unit and the Olympics inspired sports shadow charades with Mrs. G’s class.  We mixed the classes up and gave each group a sport that they acted out using our shadow theatre.  Can you guess our sports?  Check out the pictures and videos below.

  

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What a week! 🙂

 

What A Week!

This week has been a busy one in the Super Kids classroom.  Not only were we following the winter Olympics closely and making newscasts, but it was also Valentine’s Day and the 100th day of school! The class is so excited to follow the Olympics.  As I mentioned in our last post, the time change has reinforced the concept we learned about during our space inquiry unit that we’re wrapping up at the same time as everything else.  The students eagerly come into the classroom each day, to see what highlights I have to show them on our whiteboard.  The Canadian team luge competition was a hit!  If it was an exciting day for the Canadian athlete while we were sleeping, the class creates a script for our Super Kids reporters to update our followers on our blog and twitter feed.  Team Canada has even responded to our class! Check out our first three newscasts below.

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One day this week we were so into our math centres that we completely forgot to go to gym!  Once we realized the mistake what could we do?  We grabbed our crazy carpets, headed to the hill on our playground, and had a class luge competition.  I even challenged our classroom educational assistant to a race!  Unfortunately she beat me, but I’m thinking about a rematch. 🙂

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Valentine’s Day was on Wednesday and the class was excited to give their classmates a friendship card.  I have to admit that this is my favourite holiday to celebrate in my classroom.  I love watching them deliver their cards and then open them up.  Each time they opened a card they would say thank you.  I took a video that I had to share.

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I also had Valentines themed centres that students rotated through.  They included both measuring, doubles math, reading valentines books, sight word heart bingo, and contraction heart matching.

     

We made a special Valentine for our families too.  I wonder if you realize how we made it.  It was celery! We just cut off the bottom and used it as a stamp.  Then we wrote a special note to our families inside.  We even got a healthy treat out of this project.

  

Thursday was the 100th day of school!  Time flies when you’re having fun.  We rotated through centres set up in all the grade 1 and 1/2 classrooms in the school.  When the classes came to me they did 100 second exercises.  I should have thought that through a bit more!  That meant that I had to do the exercises with 6 classes! 🙂

Other activities included STEM activities, 100 piece puzzles, science experiments, snakes and ladders, and an art activity.  Thanks to our parent volunteers that joined us.

Next week our school is gearing up for some exciting Festival Du Voyageur activities.  Have great weekend!

 

Olympic Excitement and Rocket Ship Art

How can you tie an inquiry unit on space and the Olympics together?  We did!  Now that we know that there is only one place in our solar system that life can exist, we want to know how we can take care of it.  The Olympics is a perfect example of bringing the world together in sportsmanship and goodwill.  How can we encourage others to keep this spirit all year long and recognize that we have only one planet to live on together? How we get there is completely up to my super creative kiddos!

The class has been working hard on their planet projects.  Most have finished their research using the Pebble Go website and books from our classroom library.  Many have had their research typed up in “book writing” and are now making their books.  One Super Kid even asked if we could make an “All About The Author” page with their pictures on it.  “Like real authors do” he said. Of course I told him he is a real author and that would be a great idea!  Stay tuned for our finished products coming soon!

Mars sand hasn’t touched water in over 13,000 million years according to NASA.  Using “Space Sand” we tested this theory.  “Space Sand” is the same sand that NASA uses in their Mars experiments.  We predicted what would happen and then tested it.  First we put the sand directly into the water and even pulled it out with a spoon.  The kids were amazing that it repelled the water and actually came out of the water dry!  One Super Kid asked how people would grow food on Mars if they ever went there.  What a great question!  I told the class about the fictional movie “The Martian” where the astronaut survived by farming his own potatoes.  How could this be with soil that hasn’t touched water in millions of years?  Another Super Kid told me that it was just a movie and not real.  After laughing, I thanked him and told him that it made me wonder and now I have so many questions about how people would live on Mars!

      

Inspired by all of our learning, we just had to make some art.  Designing rocket ships when we created our classroom ship, lead to this art project.  With our imaginations running wild the Super Kids created some amazing pieces.  Make sure to pop by the classroom if you can to see our display.

    

On Thursday, I challenged the class to create symmetrical stars using pattern blocks.  The STEM activity needed their prior knowledge about symmetry from our rocket ship art project.  Students were paired up and many started with small creations and then discovered that there were no limits.  They began to build up and create more elaborate designs.

The Olympic medal count chart is up and ready to be filled in on Monday.  Each day a different classroom in our neighbourhood will be responsible to update the medal count.

We are so excited the Olympics have officially started!  The time change has really reinforced our lessons on day and night, as well as the Earth’s rotation.  On Friday we watched some of the highlights from the opening ceremonies.  We were very excited to see the cauldron being lite because we had made our own in our classroom.  The class create our own newscaster desk to tell our schoolmates, families, and our blog followers all about the highlights from the Olympics!

This coming week is going to be very busy in the Super Kids’ classroom!  We have Valentine’s Day, 100th Day, Olympic highlights, and much more.  We can’t wait to share it all with you.  Enjoy your weekend. 🙂

Scientists, Poets, and Researchers

This past month our school has had many whole school learning opportunities related to the brain.  We even got to look at and hold animal brains brought by visiting scientists.  Honestly, I wasn’t sure what to expect.  Would the kids want to touch the exhibits? Of course they did!  One Super Kid even wondered how many thoughts were in the brain as she held it in her hands.

 

We headed back to the classroom and read “Your Fantastic Elastic Brain”.  This book explains the parts of the brain perfectly for our age group.  How do we stretch our brains? We then shared things and activities we have learned, what we’re learning, and what we want to learn.

Our learning buddies classroom created a huge inflatable brain in our main floor learning commons.  The class loved exploring it and learning from the 5/6 kids.  “We’re the thoughts Mrs. Didyk!”  🙂

The Super Kids have become astronomers!  The class has been busy researching planets, the sun, and the moon.  Using non-fiction information books and the pebble go website, the class has been learning all about the solar system. Working together, the Super Kids created their very own space ship!

   

 

  

The moon doesn’t produce any light of its own.  It reflects the light of the sun.  The shadows create the moon phases.  What are shadows?  This started a focus on creating our own shadows and reading some great books from our school library. We created tin foil people and created shadows with them too!

         

The Super Blue Blood Moon was yesterday! It won’t happen again unit 2037.  Early in the morning the moon (which is the second of the month and 14% larger then normal) turned a red colour because it was a lunar eclipse!  The morning was spent watching NASA’s feed, which showed the moon going through all of its phases and then turn red.  We learning why it doesn’t just disappear and wondered if the astronauts in the space station would see it too.  The moon dog is a rare occurrence, but it happened yesterday morning too!  The picture below was sent to me by a friend of mine and I had to share it with he class.  Moon dogs occur when you can see the lunar halo because there is ice crystals in the air which causes refraction.  So much to learn about the moon in one day!

 

We read the book “Once In A Blue Moon” by Danielle Daniel .  Perfect for the occasion!

The book is a poem that talks about rare occurrences in nature.  The Super Kids then created their own poetry in the style of the book.  Mrs. G, my teaching partner, has this wonderful idea! We’ll share our poetry with you when we’re done. 🙂

On another note, the winter Olympics are started next week. Our classroom is excited to watch and learn about the different sports and cheer on the Canadian team.  We created our own caldron this afternoon!

February is full of exciting learning opportunities!  Stay tuned…