We’re Off To A Great Start!

A full week of school is under our belt and the Super Kids are excited to be back.  My grade one new friends are adjusting to being at school the whole day, discovering what recess is, and how to take turns when learning new games.  My grade two friends are excited to learn new things, be leaders in the classroom, and make new friends.

Have you read the new Mo Willems book “The Pigeon HAS To Go To School”?  It has instantly become a class favourite!  After reading the hilarious book we had to make our own pigeons and help the him get to school by making our own buses.  The first two days of school had us learning about colour mixing, direct drawing, and a STEM design project that included wheels and axels.

 

What is science?  What is a scientist?  How do scientists see the world?  These are three questions that will guide our learning this term in science.  Scientists question, observe, record data, experiment, and use their senses to see the world around them.  Using magnifying glasses to help us observe objects, the Super kids went outside to explore our playground.  Have you ever looked closely at a flower or maybe a fossil?  Our school has a wall in the front of the school that is full of fossils so we had to take a closer look.

This past Tuesday was our provincial election in Manitoba.  Our school was used as a polling station so as you can imagine we had a lot of people in and around our school that normally aren’t there.  This process can be a bit tricky for kids to understand.  The Super Kids were greeted by an election in our classroom as they walking in.  Each student had to register to vote, watch commercials that tried to sway their vote using QR codes.  Then it was time to cast their informed choice at our polling station.  What were we voting on?  Do we like Oreo or chocolate chip cookies the best?  As you can imagine we had strong opinions on both sides!  We invited other adults and classrooms to come and vote with us.  Our classroom polling station closed at 3:00 in the afternoon so we could tally up our findings and let everyone know our results.  Oreo won only by 12 votes!

Have you heard of “Dot Day”?

Peter H. Reynolds is a children’s book author that writes a series of books that encourage kids to take risks, try new things, and get creative.  His book “The Dot” encourages kids to make a mark and see where it takes them.  September 15 is International Dot Day which is celebrated in many schools around the world.  Since that date fell on a Sunday this year we celebrated on Friday.  Activities included Twister, connect 4, dominoes, felt art, and even a 3D dot app that transformed the students drawings in the spheres.

The Super Kids learned that Kandinsky and Kusuma are two artists that use dots in their abstract and modern art pieces.  Kandinsky painted the music he heard and with help of the “The Noisy Paint Box” storybook, we did the same thing.  While listening to some classical music each student created their own dot art that will be part of our classroom’s collaborative art piece inspired by Kandinsky.

Kusuma is a Japanese artist that came to the US and thought that the cars and people looked like little dots moving around when she was high up in buildings looking down.  This inspired her to make art using dots.

 

Learning and understanding the flow of the classroom has been a huge focus this past week and will continue to be in the next few weeks.  Reader’s and Math workshop has started.  It will take a while to build our stamina for staying at an activity, but the class is eager to learn new math games and explore our classroom library.  Home reading, the RAZ kid program, guided reading and guided math will all get started this week.  It’s going to be an adventure!  🙂

 

 

Print Friendly, PDF & Email

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *