A quick update!

Hello! So sorry for the lack of posts - I shall try to do better. We have a "Make Learning Visible" board in our class, on which I document student learning by pictures and reflections made by the students. For this post, I've added our most recent documentation on two new centres in our class and our thoughts on it.

  

One of the things that I love about the documentation (pictures and anecdotal notes tied to Ontario curriculum expectations, ect.), is the opportunity to look back on our learning and reflect on it with the students. So far in our centre we have practiced and demonstrated: 

• 1. questioning skills 
• 2. increased vocabulary (strong, stable, fasteners) 
• 3. mathematics concepts (smaller, bigger, stronger, wide, short, long, heavy, light)
• 4. habits of leadership (synergize, win-win, begin with the end in mind)
• 5. planning
• 6. literacy (drawing and writing the plans, oral communication as they explain their design)
• 7. Throughlines of Christian education as students have begun to be order-discoverers and servant-workers as we build things for others
• 8. Finally, obviously, learning about building - what does building mean, what are fasteners, what is a plan, how to begin a project, etc.

The following is the first time I've done this provocation and it is now one of my favourite art moments!

Students in this activity are exploring new art mediums and techniques (pastels). Drawing while laying on the floor created a new dynamic to "art" that created rich dialogue and new language. Students also learned that Michelangelo was the name of an artist before it was the name of a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle!

I hope you've enjoyed this sneekpeek into the classroom!

I Can...

Hello! The past several weeks have been very busy, but very good! We have learned so much, and have been practicing naming our learning - "I can ..."

Today, we loved having our Grade 3/4 buddies join us for the first time! These buddies will read with us, do crafts with us, and several other fun things throughout the year! Today, we coloured poppies, ate lunch, and explored some centres together!

LU: We love our a grade 3/4 buddies.

JE: We had snack and coloured and played with them!

We appreciated the Grade 5/6 assembly so much today, and had good reflection time after to be thankful for our freedom in Canada, and for those who give for that freedom.

We also made a puppet centre this week - we set up the theatre, made money for tickets, made paper popcorn, signs, and made our play! This is so full of rich learning - oral communication, writing, expression, planning, synergizing, fine motor skills in cutting out the popcorn, and much more!

RO:  We all made the puppet show. We made popcorn and money and signs!

We also practiced our retell skills - what happens first, next, and last in a story!

JA: At the retell centre, we had two stories. And we can tell them! This one was Don't Eat the Teacher!

We also learned: I can investigate! These are pumpkin and gourd seeds we will explain with!

We learned to use tallies to count our pumpkin seeds!

We also learned to use ten-frames as a math tool, and learned lots about the special number ten!

We can write! We began our big beautiful books, thinking about what we want to write, making one line for each word, write (somewhere along the continuum between pretend writing and adult writing), and draw - illustrate - their idea!

We have also been practicing, practicing, practicing for Student-Led Conferences! We are so excited for you all to come in and see what we have learned so far this year!

Long Time No Blog

My apologies for the late blog - we've been learning so much that there hasn't been time to write about it!

Therefore, we don't promise to make this short!

We loved Grandparents Day! We sang a song and wowed the crown with our voices and our smiles. We also had so much fun leading our grandparents around and showing them our room (it was also fun pretending to be each other's grandparents to tour around the room!)

In literacy we made rhyming word puzzles, and then traded with our friends to see if we could figure out theirs! This was one of our favourite things!

We have also just yesterday started learning syllables by clapping our names. This is another phonemic awareness skill that is important for understand how words are built in reading and writing. We also used picture and context clues during independent reading to find words and clap them as well.

We use letter chompers during this time to find letters and eat them up!

In math, we have learned about sorting and organizing information. We have learned about surveys and t charts and bar graphs. Today we learned about pictographs!

We have begun our leadership binder and our leadership roles - ask your child about their classroom responsibilities! This is our week of training but several students have already assumed full roles!

We also saw leadership in other areas. After listening to different sounds on our piano keyboard for high and low and different tones, thanking God for sound, JE asked if the piano could be a centre. I said yes, but that I was not able to organize it that day because we had other learning plans that I couldn't move, like small group math centres; therefore we would need a student action team! JE and HA stepped up, and independently decided on three rules for the centre, asked for help with spelling, made a poster, and helped explain the centre to the rest of the class! They worked very well together, and our class is enjoying the new centre!

We have also started exploring fall! We looked at the pallet of colour God used in fall. This made us wonder about why not all the yellows looked exactly the same, and why they sort of melted into the oranges and the greens.

The students would like to tell you what happened next!

"We wanted to know what colours weren't in the leaves. We used the iPad to look up colours and we found a colour wheel.

We decided to make one, so first we learned about primary colours - we call them powerful primaries because they make the other colours: red, blue, and yellow. 

Then we practiced mixing them to make different shades of the secondary ones: purple and orange and green!

We turned a table upside down to trace! (PS. This was an exciting moment!)

And we used our cutting skills to cut out the circle!

Then we used markers to make lines where the colours need to go and tape so we can stay in the line.

Then we made labels and put the (secondary) colours in the middle of the ones that made them!"

We are going to glue in things God made in those colours and our shades! We will also show and share to Grade 1/2 who are learning about colour right now as well!

Go, Go, Go

This week felt like we were on fast-forward! I was very happy to be back with our class and we enjoyed so much learning!

I'll back up to last Wednesday first, though! Despite busing issues and delays, we made it to the Airforce Museum and had so much fun! We played I Spy through the park, finding mascots and numbers on planes, and learning about different kinds of planes. We went into a very big Hercules aircraft, buckled into the seats, learned about it's use, and sat in the cockpit!

We came back from that trip with knowledge of what planes had, like propellers and wings, and tires for landing. We continued our discovery of how planes go this week! We discovered that when air is forced out/through something, it can make something move, like air from a fan, or air rushing out of a balloon (which we loved watching fly along the string across the room!). We also discovered, by blowing on pieces of tissue paper, that when air goes faster under the wing then over, it goes up! 

We also addressed learning skills through this topic as we discovered how library and books can be used to answer "I wonder's."

This week, we also opened a new sensory centre - the water table. OW and AY were interested in my problem about getting it set up - when, where, and how without making a mess. Also, how full? As they solved these problems, they practiced oral communication, innovation, problem solving, and leadership abilities. They also learned estimating and capacity skills as I asked probing questions through their work. Other students like TR became interested and also shared ideas. We put in food colouring to see how it dispersed through the water as well.

We also spent a lot of time this week talking about what we are thankful for. Answers included family, fun, colours, and BCS! We took our creativity to paper then to represent these things, and learned about labeling and letters in the process! We also explored thankfulness through songs and psalms in the Bible!

We dabbled in a few different topics in math this week as well, as our explorations took us to different places, and as we extended our knowledge by asking questions.

Certain centres I put out are provocations - that is, open-ended, no right answer, just seeing what they will do with it. It allows them to build innovating and problem-solving skills. In this picture, students decided to make towers for the numbers. JE made a tower, counted it, and found he had 22. I hadn't put that number on the table so he found it on our hundreds chart and brought it over! We noticed that numbers in order went up the same height, but JE's was higher by more because it "wasn't a next number."

At another provocation, we discovered that things are made of shapes. Some used the template while others expanded into free form creation. This led to a discussion about 2D and 3D shapes!

We discussed different attributes this week as well, expanding from sorting by the colour and size rules and moving to things that could be sorted in several ways. We practiced describing the way things feel, look, smell and sound!
This led to the feeling box centre where students continued exploring texture and description - this is great for vocabulary building!

In literacy we continued to explore rhyming, in songs, games, and now in puzzles. Students worked together in groups to put together puzzles of rhyming words!

We also explored letters in a game during explore time with our volunteer! RE, AY, and TR sorted by colour, counted, and found letters and sounds that they knew!

We also talked about being creation-enjoyers, as part of us being in God's story. We took walks outside, played with the guinea pig, and had a Friday picnic! On our walks we especially enjoyed feeling the different kinds of grass (long, long and poky, wet, short and dry) and then laying and enjoying the sun. We took some of our treasures inside to see the wonders under the magnifying glass as well!

Have a wonderful Thanksgiving!