This week we had our first library class! The kids were thrilled to meet Mrs. Nicole, our library assistant, in the beautiful space. We even had a ribbon cutting before we entered. One Super Kid was so excited to go to the library that he had a dream about it the night before. The class was thrilled to see all the books and excited to be the first kids to take them out. All of our library books are brand new!!!!
This week we continued our discussion on cause and effect. We looked at books and videos about what an engineer is and how they help solve problems by designing solutions. We read the book “Rosie Revere Engineer” by Andrea Beaty. If you haven’t read it, our class highly recommends it. It’s a book about a second grade student who designs things and realizes that not all of her inventions will always work the first time.
We also watched a couple of YouTube videos to support our discussion. The first is from “Crash Course Kids” a series of short science education videos, the second is a movie clip from the animated movie “Meet The Robinsons”, and the third is a clip from a “Sid The Science Kid”episode on incline planes.
Armed with our prior knowledge from last week’s first attempts and our new found knowledge of engineers, incline plane, and a can do attitude, we revisited our chain reaction designs.
It was amazing to see their designs develop and their confidence grow. The class didn’t get frustrated, but had the try again attitude necessary for testing designs. Thank you to those families that sent in items to help develop our designs.
This week we started our math workshop and reader’s workshop. Students are grouped into math clubs and book clubs. These groups rotate through a variety of centres set up to help develop their number sense or literacy skills. One of the centres is “work with teacher”. The group comes to the moon table and we work on reading strategies geared to the group’s reading level in reader’s workshop and number sense strategies during math workshop.
Friday was “Orange Shirt Day” in the Louis Riel School Division. It is a day to reflect on the history of residential schools in Canada and their effect on the Indigenous people. We talked as a class about how we are all unique and come from a variety of backgrounds. We’re lucky to be able to be ourselves and express our traditions. Unfortunately, that hasn’t always been the case for some cultures in Canada and around the world. To be honest it was a difficulty conversation to have with my class. They are so loving, kind, and compassionate. They can’t imagine a world and time where they couldn’t be themselves. Our school had a walk along the trails in our community to honour the day.
On a completely different note, our class is excited to be recognized by the Edublog community! We found out on Friday afternoon that the platform that we use for our classroom blog, Edublog, tweeted out our classroom’s blog to it’s members and posted our link in the online newsletter! The kids asked me to thank them which we did and they responded that they love the work we’re doing as a class. The class thinks their famous! We checked out our cluster map and we had hits from Venezuela, China, Germany, Brazil, Belgium etc. In September we had over 700 visits to our blog! Wow! We are connecting with the world and learning about being a safe digital citizen at the same time.
I’ll see my Super Kids on Monday! 🙂
Your innovative teaching has inspired Eva to come home and teach the family about cause and effect, chain reactions, the meaning of orange shirt day, and the fact that her class is now truly famous around the world! Her excitement and enthusiasm about her learning is beautiful to witness and we are thankful for all the hard work and creativity you put in each day!!!!!!!!
Thank you for your kind words!