We began the morning outside and excited about our first Winter Sports Day.  Unfortunately as the morning went on the weather became colder and we had to go inside.  We still got our hot chocolate so all was well!  Thank you to all the parents that came to help today.  It was still fun despite the weather!  I hope everyone has a wonderful, restful break and festive Christmas season.  Take the time to create wonderful memories together with family and friends!

Today room one and room two practiced our Dr. Coffin Twelve Days of Christmas song and we will sing it tomorrow at Carol singing.  If you can't join us please ask your child to sing it to you tonight.  Tomorrow afternoon we will watch a special show and if you have a special treat that you want to send for just your child that would be fine.  Today we tried to finish our own Twelve Days of Christmas book and our Color Poster in our visual journals.  If you would like to join us or help on Friday for our Outdoor Sports Day then please let me know.
We are sad to hear that Juman will be leaving our classroom and going to a new school after the holidays.  We will miss her but we know that she will make lots of new friends at her new school.

Today was our first day of carol singing.  We also went on the computers and did Raz Kids.  The login and account info is glued into the agenda.  We also worked on our visual journal and we added to our Twelve Days of Christmas.  In Music we played follow the leader.  We also sang some Christmas carols in music to help us learn the words.  We enjoyed singing Jingle Bell Rock.   In gym we also continued to learn some hockey skills.  If there are any parents that want to volunteer for outdoor sports day on Friday please let me know.

We started some new festive centers in the morning for the last few days before holidays.  Some of them are  making a snowman ornament, holiday cards, homemade decorations and posters to color. and word puzzles.  We started practising hockey skills in gym.  We shot the puck in the net and we practised stick handling.
Tomorrow and Wednesday and Thursday we have carol singing in the learning commons starting at 9:00.

Today we learned about predators and prey. We learned about the food chain that could exist on Nosehill and then played a game outside to see what it would be like to be an animal in the Nosehill food chain.  Before we went outside we did some research to see what our animals would eat to survive and created a chart to help us.

In our game some people were herbivores and had to hunt for food in special food stations. Other people were omnivores and carnivores and had to hunt the herbivores for food. At first there was a lot of running and screaming as the herbivores tried to run away from their predators. As we kept playing the game we noticed that the game started getting quieter. The herbivores like mice, hares, and deer started figuring out that hiding and being really quiet was important for their survival. If they yelled and stayed in the open areas it was easy for the predators like coyotes, cougars, and eagles to catch them.

We also discovered that the game was a lot harder for herbivores that were wearing really bright colours. We talked about how animals have to be able to camouflage so they blend in with their environment. If they don't blend in they will get eaten quickly.

Some of us even saw a real mouse! We noticed that it ran away really quickly and hid inside a hole near a tree. We realized that the mouse through we were a predator and was using its survival strategies to keep itself safe.

Just a reminder that this evening is the Festive Evening at school.  We will be outside tomorrow for Fresh Air Friday so please dress for the weather.

Today we started writing our own version of the Dr. Coffin Twelve Days of Christmas.  We hope to sing our class version at the carol singing next week.  Today we did some color facts.
Did you know...
- that to make a shade you need to add black.
. that primary colors and secondary colors when mixed together make tertiary colors.
- that when you add white to a color it is a tint.
-that when something is see through it is transparent.
-that the cool colors are purple, blue and green.
We have to add some Did you knows to our Color Poster to show our learning.

We are excited for the Festive Evening tomorrow night at school!

Today we started working on showing what we know about colors in our Visual Journal.  We used the Color Wheel and our Tints and Shades project.  In gym we played a real basketball game with two teams.  We had treats at treat day and thank you to friends that brought extra money to share with those of us that forgot.  We created a graph to show our garden votes as a big class graph.  It is hanging on our wall by the garden light.

Tomorrow is treat day hosted by room 4.  Please send 25 cents if you would like your child to have a treat at recess.  Today we learned how to take care of our indoor plants by watering them and making sure they have enough air, water, soil and light.  We read a story called Polar Express.  Diego brought a silver bell to school as well as a ticket from his Polar express experience.  Today we did an art project with corn syrup and food coloring dropped onto paper.  We tilted the paper in different directions and the corn syrup would make a strange and interesting shape.

Our voting results.

Today we voted for the vegetables we wanted to plant in our indoor garden.  We were excited to see the results of our votes.  We had only five pennies to cast and we could choose to put them into any of the bags we wanted.  We could even put more than one penny into a bag if we really wanted a certain vegetable.  The voting results are above.  This afternoon we planted some of the vegetable seeds into small plant pellets and now we wait and watch.  We also learned about our Red Wiggler composting worms and gave them some left over vegetables from our outdoor garden.  

Just a reminder that there is no school tomorrow.

Today in gym we practiced our passing and blocking by playing Pig in the Middle.  Today was our first day of trying our new pattern centers. Each table group gets a center for two days.  Some of the centers are picture centers, music centers, beading centers, shape centers, polka dot painting centers and even more. We finished our magic milk experiment writing.  When we were done we got to go on to the grade one and two folder on the computers. Grade ones had to write one or more I wonder ideas and the grade twos had to write two or more.  We got to share our gardening ideas with a buddy.  Tomorrow we will vote about what we will plant.  Tomorrow afternoon we will plant our indoor garden.

Today we wrote about our magic milk experiment one of our ideas about what we observed was that we saw the colors change and swirl.  We wondered what would happen if we did the experiment in a glass jar so that we could see the colors swirling underneath.  Today was our last day to write about our vegetable garden choices.  We planned our arguments so that we could convince others to plant our choices.  We will share them tomorrow and then vote on Thursday.  Today in math we were introduced to new pattern centers.  We will start these tomorrow.  In the front hall some parents decorated the hallway for our festive activities in December.  School Pictures are in back packs.