Fresh Air Friday, Animal Food Chain

Dates to Remember:

Next week we will begin another residency with a local storyteller, Karen Gummo.  She has done a great deal of story telling work around Calgary and has also toured and worked with many schools.  She will be working with classes over the next three weeks prior to the break.  We will be working on oral story telling, stories from the past.  With the grade one and two classes she will be telling animal stories focusing on Nose Hill.

March 4th will be Spirit Day, Stuffie Day.

- Friday March 6th, room 1 and 2  is hoping to go to Nose Hill for our Fresh Air Friday.  If you are able to volunteer for this please let me know.  We will be looking for 3 to 4 volunteers for each class.
I already have two volunteers.  If you are still able to help please let me know.


Learning Updates:

We began the day with our Big Buddies.  They were very excited to share their Battle Bunny projects with us.

We all met in the big buddy classroom to hear Mrs. Saunders and Mr. Pedenko read the Battle Bunny book which was the inspiration for the project.

After our Big buddy time we met back in the classroom to learn what our job was today as junior zoologists.  We began by reading the story called "Wolf Island".  It is a story about an island that inhabits all types of animals including wolves.  There is a balanced habitat.  The wolves end up off the island, ask me how this happened.  Over time the ecosystem became very unbalanced.  We learned about how this is important in a food chain.  This was followed by an activity where we each got pictures of animals and we had to try and figure out what the food chain would be by placing the animals from top to bottom with the carnivores at the top omnivores in the middle and the herbivores at the bottom.  We will continue working on this next week.





We went outside to play an animal food chain tag game.  Some of us were carnivores and we had to wear red pinnies.  The omnivores wore yellow pinnies and the herbivores wore red pinnies.  The blue pinnies were disease and they could tag any animal.

The herbivores got a head start and they were allowed to start gathering food.
The herbivores had to gather food from red cups that had been stashed in the Whispering Woods.  Each time they found a cup they could take out one penny.  This was their food supply.  If they got caught by an omnivore or a carnivore they had to give up one penny to the animal that had tagged them.   The omnivores could also eat from the cups and were also able to tag herbivores to get food.  The carnivores could tag any of the animals to get food.  Once you had no more pennies it means you did not survive and you had to go to the teacher to answer a skill testing question and then you were given one more penny.

The challenge for the herbivores and omnivores was that they also tried to camouflage and hide in order to survive with only the food supply that they had.

Here are some pictures of us playing the game.

Alien in Line Skating

Dates to Remember:
Next week we will begin another residency with a local storyteller, Karen Gummo.  She has done a great deal of story telling work around Calgary and has also toured and worked with many schools.  She will be working with classes over the next three weeks prior to the break.  We will be working on oral story telling, stories from the past.  With the grade one and two classes she will be telling animal stories focusing on Nose Hill.

March 4th will be Spirit Day, Stuffie Day.

- Friday March 6th, room 1 and 2  is hoping to go to Nose Hill for our Fresh Air Friday.  If you are able to volunteer for this please let me know.  We will be looking for 3 to 4 volunteers for each class.




Learning Updates:
We began the week with a whole school meeting in the Learning Commons.  It was a mid year checkin to remind our Dr. Coffin students about the Pillars of Care that we try to use everyday at our school.  The teachers and staff noticed that this reminder was needed.  Mrs. Polski made some posters to help us remember these things and they are hanging in our front hallway.  These are everyday expectations that we have for the students at Dr. Coffin School.




We have also been enjoying our Alien In-Line Skating sessions all week.  There has been BIG improvements over the past three days.
We learned how to:
Stop Drop
Brake
Balance and Turn
We learned some fancy moves such as:
Lemon Drops
Slalom skate
Lemon Drop Cross
Some of the tricks we learned to do are:
Monkey Crawl
Jump Skate
Race Car and Chicken Nugget


Here are some quotes about skating from the kids...
"It was a fun skating week."

"Some people could already skate on the first day. "

" Most of us got better each time. "

"It was so much fun!"

"Big thank you to all the volunteers that came to help us with putting on the gear!"

Please enjoy some of the photos and videos...  (Make sure you go full screen)

Solar powered car, Fresh Air Friday

Dates to Remember:
Alien In line skating will be all of next week, M-Th,  for our gym residency.
See attached schedule if you are able to come by and help with putting on skates.
Monday - 8:40 - 9:30
Tuesday 8:40 - 9:30  and 2:40 - 3:30
Wednesday 8:40 - 9:30

February 25th- Treat Day
February 26th Pink Shirt Day
Every Wednesday at lunch we have Art Club for grades one to three, for those interested.


Learning Updates:
Today for Fresh Air Friday our learning intention was building an understanding of what animal do for winter.  Do they adapt, migrate or hibernate?  What do certain animals do to adapt?  Along with this they met their their animal clues group to research what their animal does.  We played Camouflage in the Whispering Woods  imagining that we were animals trying to blend in to the environment regardless of the colors we were wearing.   We talked about the location of the eyes for predators and prey and how they are very attracted to any type of movement.  In the game you have to stay perfectly still.  We ended the morning by truing to run across the soccer field below to see how hard it is for animal prey to run away from predators in the winter.
In these pictures you will see us running to hide and then hiding.  Can you spot us?










We went to see the solar race car presentation yesterday from the University of Calgary.   Ask me about how it works and what I learned about solar energy?

Dates to Remember:
Alien In line skating will be all of next week, M-Th,  for our gym residency.  If you would like to help with putting on skates please let me know and I will post the schedule to you.
February 25th- Treat Day
February 26th Pink Shirt Day
Every Wednesday at lunch we have Art Club for grades one to three, for those interested.

Learning Updates:
In science we have been working very hard on our animal clues game and poster.  We are going to begin sharing them today.  We will read our clues and then see if our friends can guess which animal it is.



The picture of the animal is on the back of the poster... Can you guess who I am?

In math we are working on our Pattern centers and today Ms. Ha our practicum student from Mount Royal also introduced a short lesson on counting patterns.  It went along with a story that she shared.  We have also been working on looking at counting patterns and numbers to see if we can guess what the pattern is that we are seeing, based upon the numbers that are put up.  We are talking about different strategies to use to figure out the pattern.

In word work we have been working on word families that have the long vowel sounds.  The grade twos have been looking at identifying words with long and short vowels and some of the rules that go along with this.  Rules such as "when two vowels go walking the first one does the talking" or "An "E" on the end of the word bullies the other vowel and makes it say its name".

In Language learning we are beginning to look at the elements of a good story.  Today Mrs. Hamby read a story called ":Stuck", by Oliver Jeffers and we talked about the importance of a good setting.  We then added to our 3D projects to begin to create a setting for a story that we will be creating and telling to each other.  We need to think about what to add to the project to make a good setting for the type of story we want to tell.  We will also be making finger puppets that we will use to practice telling a good story.

Our Story String

In gym this week we have jungle safari.  It is set up as an obstacle course with the gymnastics equipment and the traverse wall and climber .