New Year, New Learning!

Hey look, I finally wrote a blog post again!

As you know, we learned about building in December, and also have been working hard on our reading and writing. Our new project is an excellent way to authentically use all of these skills.

Below is the driving question for our project, and some answers that we came up with!

We made a plan to first do research on the life of birds, discuss the impact of winter, and then decide how to do something about it. 

Our Research

Students worked so hard on drawing scientific pictures of birds! They looked at reference pictures, added details of the habitat, and wrote their bird facts. As we progress in building our milk-carton birdfeeders (this idea!), we will also post our pictures in our school community before compiling them into a class book!

We have also learned much about 2D shapes, focusing on circles, triangles, squares, and rectangles and the properties of each (type of edges, sides, corners). Today we took that learning to make pictures. In this math exercise, I not only saw mastery of shape concepts, but also exceptional creativity, attention to detail, innovation, proactive choices in getting started right away, and the ability to problem solve (and not giving up) when something they had planned didn't work the way they thought!

As always, it is an honour to teach your children. Writing report cards has given me space to reflect on the amazing personalities inside each one of them. They bless me every day with their giggles, hard work, and delight in the world God has made!

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!