Make it Float!

This morning after guided reading we worked on making puppets to tell our Arctic story.  This story telling helps us to practice telling our story ideas with puppets and we can change our stories if we don't like how the story is coming along.  This allows us to change our ideas before we start the hard work of being a writer and writing our story down.

One of the guided reading groups made slime this morning and tomorrow they will have to finish it.  They are practicing following and reading instructions.

After recess we had word work.  Grade ones practiced our no excuse words with a buddy.
Grade twos played a game called contractions.  You had to try to match contractions to the original words.

In Treasure math some of us got through the Lazy Lagoon.  The next part of the journey encounters rough seas and we have to make sure that our cargo is lined up.  The cargo is a domino game and we have to match the dominos to a playing board.  We are practicing the math skill called subitizing.  We have to practice so that we can line up the dominos in five minutes.  We are using sand timers to time ourselves.  We have three timers, 15, 10 and 5 minutes.  We can't move on to the next part of the journey until we beat the 5 minute timer.

This afternoon we met in our class groups to share our theories about why something will sink or float.  Then we were given a challenge.  We each got a piece of plasticine and we had to make it float.  We tried different shapes until we got one that could float.  Now we have to look at our theories and see what worked and didn't work.  Some of us got it to float.  It had to be like a bowl that was spread out and that no water could get over the sides.

Tomorrow Malik is the helper.  Tomorrow is world water day and everyone is encouraged to dress in blue.

FIirst Day of Spring!

After guided reading we read a story about Spring. It was called "It is Spring".  We talked about some signs of spring.  Erik said that he saw some robins this weekend.  We have also noticed that the days stay light a little longer than before.

This morning we worked in our journals.  We tried to write about our weekend and also about what we will be doing during spring break.

After recess the grade ones had word work and the grade twos had solo book time.  The grade ones will be reviewing their 28 "no excuse words",  this week.  A list of these words will be coming home shortly.

For math today we did treasure math.  Some of us are already on treasure box five.  Most of us are either on number three or number four.  Hailey got to have a sneak peak at number five since she finished four and was ready to move on in her journey. In number five you have to unlock the lock by cracking a code on the 100's chart to let you go  through the Lazy Lagoon.

After lunch we read another story about spring called the 'Root Children" by Audrey Wood.  We met at our small carpets and created a t-chart of things that sank and floated from our experiment last week.  Then Mrs. Hamby put us in to groups of three and we had to come up with a list for sinking a floating and our sentence starters were;
Something will float if...
Something will sink if..

Some of our ideas were;
Something will float if...
- it is light.
- it has air pockets.
-it is water resistant.
- it is made of wood.

Something will sink if...
-it is heavy.
-it soaks up water.
- it has holes.
We are still working on this and we will meet tomorrow to share our ideas and see if we agree.

We also worked to finish our watercolors this afternoon.  We added some small details with fine Sharpie markers.

 The helper tomorrow is Danish.

*Treat day tomorrow, remember to bring a quarter for treats.

Leave No Trace

Let's build here!

Here is our list of ideas

We built a tipi

I'm working on a fort.

Here's our fort.

Leave no trace!

Today we talked about Human Impacts and the idea of Leaving No Trace.  We started by meeting at the carpet and listening to a story about people damaging things in a park.  Then we got together in little groups and we had to write on chart paper some of our own ideas of what we think that means.  We got together and shared our ideas with each other.  When we saw each others' ideas we realized we knew exactly what it means.  We said things like:
DON'T:
-litter
-damage trees and plants
-trample grass
- hurt animals
- leave tracks and trails and footprints everywhere
- clean up your spot
- put out a fire
- leave dangerous things out

Then we went outside to show how you can play and build in the woods and still leave no trace of human impact.  Building forts was one of the things that we said was a negative human impact in Whispering Woods.  We gathered sticks and things from the ground that we wanted to use.  We built what we wanted to build and then when we were done we took it all down and spread out the wood around the woods again.  We took pictures at the beginning, middle and end of our building process. This was to capture evidence that we could still play in the woods and yet leave no trace.
Enjoy the photos from our morning...

This morning after guided reading we read a story called "Amorak".  The story was an arctic tale that told about how the strong caribou herds had a sickness and began making all the herd sick and weak.  The woman went to the "Great Creator in the Sky" and asked for a tool to help them.  Then she was told to go and stand by a hole in the ice.  A wolf appeared, Amorak.   The wolves began to eat all the sick caribou and soon the herd was healthy again.  We talked about the story problem and all the events that lead to the solution.  We are hoping that this conversations will give us some ideas for our own story writing.  We worked on telling someone what our story plan was.

After recess we had word work  In word work the grade ones wrote sentences using their spelling words.  The focus was to make sure you had proper punctuation and spelling for our words of the week.

Treasure math was fun today.  Some of us are already on treasure box four.  That's the part of the journey where we have to produce various number patterns to crack a code.  Once we have the secret password  and tell it to the troll, the bridge will be lifted by the troll under the bridge and we will get to continue the journey.

This afternoon we read the story called "Mr. Archimedes Bath".   In the story he discovers why the water goes up and down every time someone gets in to the tub.Then we finished our floating and sinking experiment.  We recorded what was floating and sinking and then we also had a category that was floated and then sank.  We left all the objects in the water when we went o music and gym.  After gym we checked to see if there was anything that we marked as floating and then it sank.  Next week we will look at similarities between what sank and what remained floating.

In gym we practiced our overhand and underhand badminton returns with a partner.  We are working on trying to get better at aiming and returning the bird when we work with a partner.

Tomorrow is Fresh Air Friday and we will be outside in the Whispering Woods.  It is supposed to be warm so please come dressed to be outside in wet snow.

On Monday the helper is Inga.

Author visit

We started our morning by having an author visit from Tyler Enfield.  He has visited our school before.  He just finished launching a new book that he wanted to introduce us to.  He played an instrument called the Didgeridoo from Australia.  It inspired one of the sounds he writes about in his book.

After the author visit we came back to the classroom and we worked on finishing our tipis that we started at the Glenbow Museum.  We had to add symbols to the bottom, middle and top of our tipi.  The bottom represents the land and sea, the middle represents animals and people and the top is for the sky.

After recess we had word work and then we worked on our Treasure Math.  We read the third treasure box challenge today.  The challenge is creating a song using the xylophone to soothe the mermaids to sleep.  The song has to be a pattern and we must record it on paper and perform it for one of the generals.   Some of us are still working on challenge one and two.

After lunch we read a book called "What Floats in the Moat?"  Then we went to our small carpet and we had to record our predictions of what we thought would float from a small bag of objects that Mrs. Hamby had.  She showed us each object one at a time and we had to put a check on the sheet in either the floating side or the sinking side beside the object word.  We will test our predictions tomorrow.

In gym today we practiced serving over the net to a partner and also underhand and overhand returns to our partner.

After gym we worked on finishing our watercolor paintings of the Bluenose.  They are beautiful!
They look just like postcards from Nova Scotia.

Our helper tomorrow is Solomon.

Watercolors, Treasure Maps and Badminton

This morning after guided reading we had to work on writing two paragraphs in our journals.  One was about our weekend and the other one was about our trip to the Glenbow Museum.  Some of our museum ideas included things that we did and things that we learned.  Here are some of our ideas. 

We got to make our own tipis. Sheldon told us a couple of stories about the Blackfoot Nation.   One of them was about a trapper that found a white coyote in his trap.  He had a dream and the serpent said that if he gave him the meat in his trap he would let him have his tipi.  We learned that sometimes it takes them 4 or 5 hours to tell a story.  Judy told us about a First Nations comic book character that we saw a painting about. 

In word work the grade twos practiced writing contractions into expanded form.  The grade ones had a new word family.  It was the "in" family and four no excuse words.   They were, from, or, one, had.

We opened the second treasure box today for our treasure math.  It had pumpkins in it with numbers on each pumpkin.  The number on the pumpkin told how much each one weighed.  The challenge was to add up different numbers to equal 50 kilograms.  That is the weight that had to go overboard because the cargo was sinking the ship.

This afternoon we worked on our water color paintings of the Bluenose.  We will work on them again tomorrow afternoon instead of journal finish up time.  

In gym we had badminton nets set up and we practiced serving the birds over the net.  Once we got it over the net over and over again we got to practice with a buddy.  We tried to hit it to each other over the net.

Maria is the helper tomorrow.

Glenbow Museum Tipis and Tales, Inuit its Land and People

Today we went to the Glenbow Museum.  When we got there we went and put our coats and lunch bags away.  Each class went to different programs.  Room one went to see Tipis, Tales and Teachings first.   After lunch  room one went to the Inuit program.  We played a game called the bone and stick game.  We got to touch some artifacts wearing special museum gloves.  We learned how to tell the difference between artifacts made from bone and antler.  Caribou bone is hollow and antler is solid. The Inuit people use the marrow from the bone to eat and when they take it out it leaves the bone with a hole.  When we went to the First Nations Program  we got to explore the room a bit.  Sheldon told us stories and meanings about the different symbols on the tipis.  We got to design our own tipi using symbols.  He told us that there is only one place in Alberta where the prairie meets the mountains.  Can you guess where that is?
Waterton!

Enjoy some more photos from the day.

Big thank you to all our volunteers today.  We are very grateful for each of you and the trip would not have been possible without your time.

When we got back to school we watched the second half of the Lorax movie.
Our helper tomorrow is Mika.

What is Your Impact?

Today we did not go outside, it was too cold.  We were lucky that we got to have hot chocolate at recess time.  Our recess was indoor.

We started the morning with our Big Buddies.  We read books together.

Today we worked on our Human Impacts Posters.  We are making the posters to show people what their impact is in the Whispering Woods.  We had to divide up the jobs in our groups.  The jobs were that we had to glue on photos that we took last week, type up the cons and pros ideas.  We had to attach a string from the photo to the map that we had marked on our poster.  Each string showed where that impact was in the Whispering Woods.

We watched some of the Lorax movie.  We will watch a little bit of it each Friday till it is done.  It is about Human Impacts on the earth and that is our focus for Fresh Air Friday this year.

We read a story by David Suzuki called the "Salmon Forest"  It is about how Salmon is connected to many things in the forest and that they impact many different life cycles in the forest. One impact is that they provide fertilizer to the forest from the animal scat of animals that have eaten salmon.  Bears, eagles, wolves, coyotes, birds, insects whales, seals and otters all eat the salmon and contribute to this cycle.  When the salmon die insects eat the flesh and then the birds eat the insects and all the circles are interconnected.

Our field trip to the Glenbow Museum will be on Monday.  Please make sure that your child is at school on time as we will be leaving shortly after attendance has been taken.

Protective Pendants

This morning after guided reading we worked on our story maps and some of us began creating our puppets so that we can practice telling and making up our story.  This will help us come up with our problem and also how the character might solve the problem in the story.  Once we have a chance to act it out we will begin to write our stories down,

After recess we finished the story "How I became a Pirate".  We all started working on our Pendant of protection for the journey.  We had to create a pendant that has exactly 80 beads and every tenth bead needed to big a big pearl bead. Once we finished we had to show the three generals (teachers) and they checked our pendants and stamped the treasure map at number one.  Next  time those people will get to move on to the second part of the quest to find the treasure.

Today was fun lunch and we had to stay indoors after we were finished because it was too cold to go outside.  The grade ones and twos stayed inside to watch a video.

After lunch we worked on our Bluenose drawings and then when we were ready we got a piece of watercolor paper to transfer our drawing on to.

For gym today we played a game called Ships Ahoy.  We had to move in different ways and then when we got to the different part of the ship, bow, stern, star board and port.  Mrs. Hamby called where we had to go and an action when we got there, like swab the deck, lower the sails, push ups on deck etc.
For the second part of gym we got to try out the badminton racquets and birds.

Tomorrow we will be spending some of the morning outside.  Please make sure that your child comes prepared with gloves, hats and boots and proper outdoor gear.

Monday is our field trip to Glenbow.

Treasure Map Quest

A big basket arrived today! It happened while Mrs. Hamby was reading "How I Became a Pirate".  Mrs. Saunders came to the room and she said that a man on a horse dropped of this big basket and told her to deliver it to rooms 1 and 2.  She wasn't supposed to look in the basket.  We were all so excited!  It had a letter, treasure maps, clues in little treasure chests and instructions for a pendant we need to make to protect ourselves on this treasure map quest.  The letter said we would need to use our brains and bravery.  To make our pendant we will need to use small beads and then every tenth bead would be a big pearl bead.  The pendant needs to have 80 beads.  Tomorrow we will begin our quest!

This morning we worked on adding the landscape/setting and main character to our own story maps. We will be making puppets to begin planning and acting out our story before we begin to write the story.

 We had to go to music after word work this morning.  We did this so that Mr. P's class could have music tomorrow.  They had to go to Simon Fraser to watch the Little Mermaid play.  Tomorrow we will work on our Bluenose projects during the time we would have gone to music.  We will try to finish our drawings so that we can begin our watercolor paintings.

Tomorrow is also fun lunch and wear a jersey day.  It can be a sports jersey, team jersey or Dr. Coffin t-shirt.

Our helper tomorrow is Freya.

Special Delivery

This morning after guided reading we read a story about a boy named Ming Lo. He lived in a small house close to the side of a mountain.  The house always shook and became wet when it rained from holes created by the rocks falling from the mountain.  We discussed the main character, setting, problem and events that finally lead to the solution.  We had one last day of collecting Inuit names and some of us began working on our own story plans/maps.

After word work we came back to our measuring activity in math.  During our measuring activity, an unusual letter was delivered by Mrs. Rennie.  She said that someone on a horse had delivered it and it looked very important. Here is the letter:  We are kept in suspense...

This afternoon we watched a short video about the Bluenose and we were given a dime with the Bluenose picture on it.  Now that we are in Nova Scotia we are creating a postcard of the famous Bluenose. We began working on our drawing plan.  The final piece will be a water color. postcard.   Did you know that the Ship was built in Nova Scotia and it went undefeated in races for 17 years?

We had music and then went to gym.
In gym we worked on racquet skills.  This time we practiced with a partner.  We learned how to use overhand, underhand, backhand and forehand when hitting the object.

Our helper tomorrow is Yafet.

Next Stop, Nova Scotia

Moving on to some new things...

Today we started learning about another place in Canada, Nova Scotia.  We began by looking at some pictures that Ms. Boyer took when she was there last summer.  We noticed that the landscape looks very different from the Arctic.  Lots of rocky cliffs and shorelines and also many trees and green grasses.  Some of the homes are right by the water and many people there fish.  Nova Scotia means New Scotland and Ms. Boyer brought a scarf that was the tartan of Nova Scotia.  We learned about a famous boat from Nova Scotia called the Bluenose.  We will learn more about the Bluenose tomorrow.  We will be learning about the landscape, culture of the Acadians and what jobs, natural resources and ways of living would be like there compared to the Arctic.  Both Jordan and Jasper have been there so they will also be our class experts as we learn about it together.

In math today we started some measuring activities.  We read a book called Actual Size, and then we talked about the measuring words that were used in the book.  We talked about the difference between Standard and Nonstandard measuring and tools.  A hand or foot or block would be a nonstandard way to measure and a ruler with mm, cm, dm and meter sticks would be a standard measurement since it is always the same measure.  We had to measure using different nonstandard measuring tools.  We will work on this again tomorrow.

We also started something new in gym today.  For the next two weeks we will be doing racquet sports.  Today we used paddle racquets and pompoms to explore and try different things.  We are practicing our eye-hand coordination when we do racquet sports.  We started with pompoms since they are not as bouncy so they are easier to control.

The helper tomorrow is Jack.

What's Your Impact?

Today we started our day with our big buddies.  They had chosen a story to read to us and then they helped us finish up our human impacts chart.  Our big buddies noticed that some of the impacts were because of them and us as well.

Our big buddies came to tell us that they noticed some red spots at the bottom of many Aspen trees in the woods.  They are worried about it and are going to investigate what it is.

After that we met at the carpet to share the story called "The Lorax".  We talked about how the Lorax was like an Environmental Scientist in the story.

Our Environmental Scientist  job today was to go out to the woods and capture evidence of the impact that our group focused on this week with positive and negative impacts.  We had to mark on a map all the locations that we saw this impact in the woods.  We had to mark it with a dot or an x to show that there was big impact in that spot.  We also had to take photos of the spot.

After our recess we had to color our map and also create a poster with the title which was"What is Your Impact".  Each person in the group had to have a job and if they didn't they would help the person doing the map.  One person had to go and get the pictures printed off.  We want to create posters to hang up and make people aware of the impacts that they are having on the woods.

We will continue to work on this project next Friday.

Desk Clean Out Day

This morning...

We had a desk clean out and we did some organizing of our tools and desk space.  We are learning to be responsible for our belongings.  Some of us don't have very many tools left in our tool kits.

In writing time we recorded Inuit names in our story writing section of our journal.  We used the Inuit name generator and tried to record words and names that we may use in our Arctic story.  

In word work today the grade twos played hangman to try and guess words.  The grade ones wrote sentences again using their spelling words.

We shared a story called "Howard B. Wigglebottom Listens to His Heart",  and talked about how to read cues from our friends to tell that they are not happy.  We discussed possible strategies to try when someone is not feeling very happy about something.

This afternoon...

We met with the other class and looked at each others human impacts ideas for Whispering Woods.  We compared lists and they were very similar.  The only thing that wasn't on both lists was the signage in the woods.  Room one had that one the positive impact side of the chart.  After that we had to record the ideas on our own personal chart.

Today was our last day of Jungle Safari.  We had no guards but we had to try to do the obstacle course in silence.

In music today we played Poison Pattern and played Jack and Jill.  They are both rhythm games.

Our helper on Monday is Erik.

Our Morning...

We started our day with guided reading and centers.  Some of us use center time to finish up work.
In writing this morning we added names to our story section of our journal.  The names were Inuit names that we wanted to use for characters in our story writing.

In math we played two more rounds of Race to 100.  This helped us practice what we learned yesterday.  We are getting better at using tallies and counting on to add up our tallies.

In word work today the grade ones wrote sentences using our new spelling words.  The grade twos had to find the mistakes in a paragraph.  They were practicing their editing.

Our Afternoon...

This afternoon we shared in groups our Whispering Woods pros and cons and also our recommendations. We had to share our ideas to the class as a group and then tell what our recommendation would be. Mrs. Hamby recorded our suggestions on either the positive or negative side of a T-chart.  We ended up with two ideas on the positive side.  They were the signs and the amphitheater.  Some ideas on the negative side were; cutting down trees; trampling the grass and plants; forts; pathways.  Tomorrow we will look at the ideas from room 1 and 2 together and see what ideas we had in common.  Our plan is to look at these ideas and see if we can make any changes to some of the negative impacts from people.

We went to gym for the Jungle Safari Challenge.  If we didn't have to guard yesterday we had to take a turn at being the guard today.  Some of us finished the whole course and put our name on a poster that said, "I did it!"

Today we ended our day with some journal finishing time.  Some of us are bringing our journals home to finish for homework tonight.