Enjoy some of our pictures from the day.  The jar of candy was an estimation activity that we had today.  Solomon and Yafet got the closest to 60 with their guess of 65.  Have a fun and safe evening.

Plant Study on Nose Hill

Enjoy some photos from our day.  See if your child can tell you about some of these plants.

This morning we began working on our Buck Brush facts.
We learned that:
1. Makes a refreshing tea.
2. The roots can be used to help sore throats and asthma.
3. Flowers and water makes a great lather to be used for soap.
4. Makes a good body wash.
5. Flowers can be used to clean clothes.

In math today we continued to work on our math projects.  Many of us are trying to add to our projects so that we can be in the middle of the target.

This afternoon we worked on our leaf study.  We had to make sure that we had at least two rubbings with detailed drawings as well as field notes to earn free time today.  Our field notes had to tell about the shape, edges, size and color.  We could also add other ideas for a super wow!

In gym today we tried to practice skipping tricks.  We had some cards that we could look at.  One trick was skipping with two people using the same rope.  Another one was hopping with one foot.  An even harder one was to do a heel tap with each skip and also a swing skip where you have to jump and swing the rope to the side.

* Reminder about pajama and stuffy day tomorrow!

Leaf Study

This afternoon we created a chart to help us identify and describe our leaves.  When we finish our rubbings we will have to write field notes beside each leaf about things that we observe.



Some of the leaf shapes are:  heart shaped, star shaped, saw edged and wavy edged, mitten shaped, oval shaped, fan shaped, long and narrow, needle shaped,  We only had enough time to practice a few rubbings before we had to leave to go to music.

In music today we practiced the "Fool Song" and we also did the freeze dance game.  Mr. O'Reilly played his electronic keyboard and we had to sing chords as well.

In math today we had a mini museum with the other grade one and two classes.  We walked around and looked at other projects to gather some inspiration for our own.  When we got back to our room we were very excited to get started again. 

This morning we also had centers, library, printing and word work, and Buck Brush work.  We read a story called, "The Kapoak Tree" and discussed human impacts and how important the Whispering Woods is to us.  We discussed positive and negative impacts. 
We also added the Buck Brush title to our plant study page in our art journal.

Thank you to all the families and volunteers that helped with our treat day today!

*Reminder: Thursday is wear your pajamas and bring a stuffy to school spirit day.

This week Anisha, Maria, Yafet, Satvik and Muhammed will be helping me write the blog.

This morning Mr. O was in our classroom so that Mrs.  Hamby could test the grade ones for their guided reading groups.  We worked on our journal pictures and journal writing before recess.  Then we had some time in the afternoon to finish up our journals. 

After recess we had printing and word work.  Grade twos worked on months of the year ordering them and unscrambling the words.  Grade ones worked on printing "U" We talked about the two sounds that the vowel letter makes and thought of some words that begin with that letter or included those two sounds.

Before we worked on our math project today we went over the target for this project.  The get to the middle of the target our project has to show, 4 different shapes, detailed patterns or drawings on the shapes and a creative plan that you were trying to follow.  When we share about our project we should be able to name the shapes we are using and also tell about faces, edges and vertices of a shape that was used.  We are also trying to recognize the difference between a prism and a pyramid.

After lunch we worked on finishing the water color paintings of our BuckBrush. We are preparing the page so that we can begin to work on our Buck Brush facts tomorrow morning.

In gym we went outside to practice our skipping.  We had long ropes and short ropes.  Some of us played helicopter and some of us skipped with the long rope.  We learned two skipping rhymes for the long rope.  One was called "Bubble Gum" and the other one was called "Strawberry Shortcake". Some of us wanted to have our own ropes to practice by ourselves.

Reminders*  Tomorrow is Treat Day hosted by room one.  Please send in your treats in the morning so that they can be organized and sold at the 10:30 recess time.  Each treat will cost 25 cents so please send in a quarter if you would like your child to buy a recess treat.

Also, we are hoping to go to Nose Hill on Friday to continue with some of our plant study work.  We will need some parent volunteers to accompany us to the hill and back to the school again.  If you are available please send me an email to let me know.  Thank you.

Leaf Study

This morning we started with a leaf study of the leaves that we had gathered last week.  For our study we had to do a leaf rubbing, write a title, detailed drawing of the leaf, and then we wrote field notes describing what the leaf looked like.  We were practicing our observation and describing skills to become better botanists.  Gavin described the leaf veins like little solar panels and the veins helped to spread the nutrients from the tree roots, up the trunk and into the leaves.  We were supposed to finish four leaves for our leaf study.  We will have to work on it again next week.

After recess, we practiced mapping plants in the Whispering Woods.  Botanists map plants to see if there are any changes over time in where the plants are and also if the plants are reproducing or not.  We were mapping Rose hips,  Buck brush, Willows and Aspen trees.  We used a legend for mapping each type of plant.  We will be putting our maps in our Fresh Air Friday journals next week.

It was a great fresh air Friday!

Recipe Books

We are so excited that our recipe books are coming home today!
Here is what we want you to notice:
- The delicious recipes that we tried out, some we liked more than others.
- How we decorated the recipe page.
- The potato print at the back of the cook book.
- The oil pastel artwork.
-  The drawings and the title that each of us picked for our own book.

You can also modify and decorate the recipes the way that you would like.

Our most favorite recipes were the carrot cookies, zucchini bread and the potato wedges.


October 26th will be our  first spirit day at Dr. Coffin.  It will be pajama and stuffy day.

Tomorrow is Fresh Air Friday and we will be doing some things in Whispering Woods and also with our leaf study.

There will be two notices coming home today, a lunch lad y notice and also a a stay safe notice.

Unbeetable Hummus

Today we made hummus using our beets. We didn't have enough beets so thankfully Cedar's family from room 2 had donated some from their garden as well.  We watched the demonstration of making the beets.  The ingredients were chick peas, oil, garlic and salt and of course, roasted beets.  We put it all together in the food processor and then whizzed it up!  It turned a bright pinky, purple color.  We also had our stations so that we could work on our recipe pages and art work for our cook book.

We had the hummus at the 3:00 when we came back from gym.  We ate it with carrots and pita crackers.  Some of us really liked it and some of us only had one or two tries.

In the afternoon we had time to work on our front cover and also finish up some of the work for the recipe book.  We will be finishing them up this week and then bringing them home to share with you.  We can hardly wait to try the recipes at home with our family and we are very excited about bringing them home!

We also made time in the day to finish up journals and work on our math projects.  We had class and individual pictures this morning.

*We are looking forward to fun lunch tomorrow!

This week Solomon, Loti, Gavin and Yazmine will be helping me write the blog.

*Reminder: 
Tomorrow is picture day.  Please return the picture slip indicating your background preference if you have not already done so.

This morning we spent some time working in our journals.  We started with pictures to share about our longer weekend and then it was time for library.  Some of us forgot our books since there was no school yesterday.  Mrs. Kidd doesn't like us to take out new books unless we have brought the other books back.

Then we went back to the classroom and worked in our journals.  Most of us will use our finishing time tomorrow to complete it.  The grade one goal for sharing ideas in our journal  is 3 or more ideas and the grade twos have a goal of six or more.

We have started working on our reading assessments to help us determine our guided reading groups.  Some of us went with Mrs. Hamby this morning so that she could test our reading level.  We also have quite a few University students in our room this afternoon, observing the work that we do in grade one and two.  This morning Mr. Dockerty, our Mount Royal University student was also visiting.  He comes each Tuesday morning and he will be with us till our Christmas break.

After recess, the grade ones worked on all the magic "c" letters which are, c,a,o,d and g.  We had to draw the magic c and then Mrs. Hamby called out one of those letters to turn our "c" into.  The grade twos worked on a word scramble and ordering the days of the week.

For math, we shared projects and then worked some more on our shape projects.  Solomon is making a football field. Gavin is making a parkor lava field/base,  Yazmine is making the pyramids of ancient Egypt and Loti is making a village.   Our goal is to be able to identify the shapes that we are using and then faces, edges and vertices of our shapes.  We are also constructing them from a flat shape so we have to be able to visualize it as we put it together.

This afternoon we painted our Buck brush drawings.  We are learning to observe our plants carefully as botanists.  We are looking at the leaf shapes. colors, flowers and fruits such as berries, stem shape and color.

In music today we worked on back up instruments and we had to draw the ones that we liked in our music books.  We had to listen and draw the ones that we liked into our music books.

We went outside for gym.  Our warm up was to do a lap around the field dribbling our soccer ball and then we did some target kicking using a hoop against the fence.  We had to try and kick the ball to go into the hoop.  After our warm up we could either join a soccer game or work with a partner kicking the ball back and forth.

To end the day we found out what our new job was for this week and then had a short book time.

This morning we started off with our big buddies.  Our buddies had old books from the library that Mrs. Kidd had taken out of the collection.  They asked us some questions and then read us the story.  In six weeks they are going to share with us a new version of the story.  They are very excited about this new project.

After big buddies, we came back to the classroom for our Harvesting Stations.  Today our vegetable was the potato.  We had a potato print making station, drawing a variety of potatoes showing all the different colors of potatoes, recipe station.  Before we went to the stations we had a demonstration of making potato wedges.  We learned that if potatoes turn green you shouldn't eat them because they can be toxic.  We also learned that they come in many different shapes and colors.  We had quite a few potatoes that we harvested from the sun circle this year.  We couldn't use some of them since they had been eaten by some underground critters.

We ate the potato wedges for recess and they were delicious!  Some of us had seconds, thirds and even fourths, they were so good.

After recess we got ready to do a leaf study as we are becoming junior botanists.  We are studying leaves to see how they are different from each other and in what ways they are the same.  We went and gathered leaves in Whispering Woods and at the front of the school.  We made sure that we had leaves from a variety of trees and shrubs.  We learned that looking at differences in leaves helps botanists to identify types of plants.  Next week we sill continue our leaf study in class.


*No school on Monday as there is a PD Day.

This morning after center time we continued to work on our math 3D shape projects.  Then it was time for our harvesting stations.  Today we made zucchini bread.  It was delicious!  We had the same stations again, a recipe, art and baking station.  Mrs. Hamby also brought some interesting gourds for us to look at and add to our still life drawings if we wanted to.

We had planted zucchini but it didn't grow this past summer.  We think it must have been too dry and hot.  We looked at how the plants grow and flower before the zucchini starts to grow.  We also noticed where the zucchini had been cut off of its stem.

Here are some of our drawings, we hope you enjoy them.

Today we began our day with our new centers that were introduced to us last week.  After center time we had math because of a special baking activity after recess.  In math we worked on building our paper 3D shapes projects.  Some of us have started gluing them onto the larger piece of paper to begin our project.

This morning after recess we had three special stations.  One station was baking carrot cookies.  Another station was working on the recipe page and the third station was creating a piece of still life art of a carrot.  Each teacher ran a different station and each station was about 20 minutes.  We will be putting these all in a harvest recipe book to bring home next week.

We began the afternoon by finishing up our art work and recipes pages from this morning.  After that we had journal finish up time for those of us that still needed extra time.

In gym, we played indoor soccer and then when we came back to the room we enjoyed our cookies while Mrs. Hamby read a story.  They were delicious!  I wonder what we will be making tomorrow...

We welcomed a new student in our class today.  She is in grade one and her name is Loti.  We are excited to have a new friend in the classroom.

This week Elaina, Joel, Avery and Nicholas will be sharing ideas for the blog.

This morning even though it was a Tuesday, we drew pictures about our weekends and we wrote in our journals.   Most of us wrote ideas about Thanksgiving.  Mrs. Hamby wrote about going to Ms. Boyer's wedding celebration.We also went to the library to exchange and get new library books.  Our library day is always on Tuesdays.

After recess we had printing and book time.  Then Mrs. Hamby and Ms. Boyer demonstrated how you would build 3D shape "nets" out of paper.  Our job is to decorate the net and then construct it.  Once we have built it we can glue it onto poster board to create a city or sculpture, train, scene, game or if we have another idea we can do that too.

We had music today.  In music today we played"Fool", Basia Bulat.  It is a music video and we can also watch it at home.  We just need to search it with a grown up.

In gym, we went outside to practice two soccer drills.  One was a passing drill and the other was weaving around cones with the soccer ball.  We also practiced passing the ball back and forth to a partner.

After gym we came back to the class to find out what our new jobs were this week.  We did our jobs and ended the day with a short story time.

Fresh Air Friday

Today we had three outdoor stations.  One of them was sketching the Buckbrush and berry.  Next week we will be water color painting our sketches.  We found some in the Whispering Woods beside the pathway and by the amphitheater.  We even noticed a few bushes in the Natureground.

In the nature ground we gathered seeds.  We had to look for seed pods and seeds of all the different types of plants in the Nautreground. We noticed that there were more seeds than seed pods.  Next week wi will look at our collections under the zoomie camera.

At the planting station we planted bulbs at the front of the school.  We planted tulips, Narcissus, shionodoxa, Spring Cheer mix, Trumpet daffodils, and Muscari.  We used rulers to measure our depth.  They had to be 15cm deep.  We wont be able to see them until the spring!
Thank you to Ashton and his family for the bulb donation.

Have a happy Thanksgiving weekend everyone!

We have been very busy getting our three classes organized the last few days.  Today was our first day with three grade one and two classes.

We spent the day trying to finish up some of our projects that we have been doing so that next week our teachers can introduce some new things.  This morning we were introduced to some new morning literacy centers.  These will begin next week.
 The centers are:
1. Hidden pictures (math activities)
2. Making yarn sticks.
3. Literacy games
4. Book making and stories
5. Finish up (for those that need extra time to finish work).

We ended the afternoon by going to the portable to see the new classroom.
Ask me about our special surprise for Ms. Boyer!

We will have Fresh Air Friday activities tomorrow.  We will be planting bulbs, hunting for seeds and sketching the Buckberries in Whispering Woods.  If there is anyone interested in coming to help with bulb planting tomorrow morning we will be starting by 9:30,  at the beds in front of the school.

I am bringing home a picture day notice.  Please check my backpack.  Picture day will be next Wednesday, October 18th.

Blackfoot Elder Visit

We were very lucky this morning to have a special guest in our classroom.  He is a Blackfoot Elder and his name is Randy Bottle.  He spent 45 minutes with each class sharing some stories and teaching us about the Blackfoot culture.  He told us that the Blackfoot got their name because there was a fire on the prairie and when they walked over the grass their feet were black.  He taught us how to say hello in Blackfoot and then how to tell our name in a greeting.

He showed us a very special head dress that was made from eagle feathers, fabric, elk hide, weasel pelts, bells, beads and buttons.  It was mostly white and red with some black and gray feathers.  He told us that he had it especially made to wear for Pow Wows by a man from Siksika. 

He talked about how animals are very important to them, especially the buffalo.   He told us that sometimes the animals communicate to them in their dreams.

They used every part of the buffalo.  The meat was used for food and the skins were used for clothing, rugs, tipis and many other things as well.  The horns were used for drinking water and also as a digging tool.  They used the bones to make many of their tools.  Long ago  they used horses for transportation and before that they had to walk or run.  They were very good at running.  They wore moccasins on their feet for running.  Sometimes they take two pairs if they have a long way to run. Deerfoot was a very strong runner that could run great distances.

He told us a story about a little boy that was communicating with an eagle.  He told us the name of the eagle in Blackfoot it sounds like "Beeta".
He left our class a story that he wrote and we will share it together tomorrow.

Mr. Bottle will be coming again in two weeks and we will see him many more times this year.  We are excited for his next visit.

This morning all the snow caught some of us off guard.  Please make sure that I have gloves, boots and snow pants on wet snowy days so that I can play outside and stay warm.

Before recess we worked on our journals.  Today we talked about using capital letters to begin each sentence.  We had to find the spots in Mrs. Hamby's journal message where she needed to begin her sentences with capitals.  A good way to remember that rule is that the period and capital letter work together like a team, first comes the period and then it is followed by a capital letter.

After recess we had the last day of our math challenges.  Now we will have a few days to finish up some of the challenges that we didn't complete.

This afternoon we read a story called "Tops and Bottoms".  After that we worked on writing our ideas for how to be a great citizen.  We wrote them on a picture of the earth and and then we colored the land and water parts.  We will be putting them on our citizenship flags. 

In finishing up time we had to finish our ideas and also our journals before we could have a bit of free choice time.

We played a circle tag game in gym.  It is like the game "Duck, Duck", Goose" but instead of that you had a small rubber ring that you had to drop behind somebody's back. 

Stay warm!