As the old saying goes, "all good things must come to an end". And so it is with our 2018-2019 year. We made the most of our last few days, with lots of FUN on "Fun Day", an ice cream birthday party for everyone with summer birthdays, and a picnic at Mitchell Rd Park with our Big Buddies. Fun DayIce Cream PartyBuddy PicnicThanks for a great year everyone! I will miss your children dearly. 💜
And now I'm off to spend time with my kids... We may be in the last full week of school, but the learning hasn't stopped! For the most part, we've been sticking to our regular literacy/reading routines and Math curriculum. We've been challenging ourselves with more difficult books, and have been enjoying experimenting with problem solving questions and creating shapes with geoboards. On Monday, we went on a field trip to the Pitt Meadows library and learned a lot about the history of the library, about our community, and about all of the different things that we can borrow from the library (ukuleles, telescopes, spheros, DVDs, CDs, etc.) We also talked about how if we join the summer reading club, we can get a REAL medal at the end of the summer! On our Hoffman Park walk this week, we visited a different area of the forest and discovered huckleberries! We talked about examining the leaves of the bushes, as well as the size and colour of the berries and how they are clustered, in order to determine whether or not they are edible berries. But we also learned that we should NEVER eat any berries without first talking to an adult, even if we're pretty sure that we know what kind of berries they are. We should also NEVER eat mushrooms in the forest! After we noticed one huckleberry bush, we suddenly started seeing them everywhere! It was a veritable huckleberry feast, with students carting back entire handfuls of them. One student in our class even went back to the forest after school to pick some more and then brought them home to make some huckleberry/strawberry jam that he shared with us today! Soooo yummy! Continuing with our outdoor theme, Mme brought in pocket knives this week for us to try whittling some sticks. We went to Spirit Square to find a collection of sticks and had fun trying to carve off the bark. The sentiment was: "This is really hard work, but it's really fun!" We learned about how to hold a knife properly and how to keep it away from our bodies so that we don't slip and cut ourselves. Most importantly, we learned that it's a tool that needs to be respected and treated with great care and attention. Our Big Buddy class has spent the past several weeks working on a cardboard arcade that they wanted to share with us. They did a great job building their games and we had so much fun trying them all out! But when Mme Van Sickle said that we would be going to see their "arcade", most of us didn't know what that word even meant. The world is definitely changing! This was our last week of our classroom economy, and therefore the last week to buy items at "le magasin" (the store). It has been so fun to see the growth in the students' financial literacy! Instead of them coming up with a bunch of change in their hands, asking what they can buy with it, many of them are now counting out their change all by themselves and pointing to what they are able to purchase based on the price tags. One of the important pieces of the classroom economy has been our charitable donations. Every week, before we buy anything for ourselves, we give at least one day's wages (a nickel) to charity. The charity that the class decided to support this year was Children's Hospital. Through extra donations, we've managed to collect $23.70! Mme Van Sickle will be writing a cheque this week to the Hospital. One special little girl in our class decided to spend all of her final earnings on charity rather than buying anything for herself at the store. She got to wear the "kindness cape" (la cape de gentillesse - it sounds so much better in English!) What a beautiful little heart!
We got to experience more First Nations games on Monday, this time outside in the beautiful sunshine. One of the elders from the Katzie reserve in Pitt Meadows helped to lead the games and a number of the PME student leaders were also from the reserve. The kids had a fabulous time trying out the different stations and were still talking about it late this week. Our theme in Science this week was "la lumière" (light). We learned about luminous and non-luminous objects, as well as the terms "transparent" and "opaque" (spelled the same in French as in English). We really enjoyed looking around the classroom to try to find different things that fit into those categories! But the best part was playing with the flashlights! We were each given one to play with, along with coloured cellophane, prisms, mirrors, and more. We had so much fun walking around the classroom in the dim light, using our flashlights to make different colours on the walls, creating shadows and rainbows, etc. And we discovered something totally crazy - when we combined the light of the primary colours (red, green and blue), it turned white! Our hypothesis was that mixing the three colours of light would produce a new colour, just like it does when we mix paint. But we quickly learned that it doesn't work the same way with light. We also loved seeing how we could make the light beams bounce off of a mirror and land on something opposite from where the flashlight was pointed. In the forest this week, we came up with a great game on our own of "find the diamond". We dug for diamonds, stole diamonds from each other's bases, and played so well together that Mme Van Sickle forgot to even watch the time! We were almost late getting back.
We had a great week of learning about our First Nations communities. Madelaine McCallum, from the Nehiyow people in Saskatchewan, came to the school to perform the art of Pow Wow dancing. She also brought up some teachers to dance with her, including Mme Van Sickle. We all thought that was pretty funny and spent the next couple of days trying to mimic Mme Van Sickle's moves (or lack thereof). The Grade 4s and 5s also came to our classroom today to teach us how to play a fun bean bag game that originates from the Blackfoot tribe. We had a great time trying to earn points by hitting the different-coloured sticks. We especially loved the fact that some of us had better aim than Mme Van Sickle, despite all her efforts to visualize and "see the stick, be the stick" before throwing. We had some more fun with shapes explorations this week in Math. We went on a shape treasure hunt around the school, practicing our tally marks as we counted how many of each shape we saw around the playground. There were a lot of very excited: "Madame! Regarde! Un losange!" as we pointed to the chainlink fence, and gleeful squeals as we noticed pentagons in the spiderweb apparatus, octagons on the stop sign, circles in the manholes, and hexagons on nuts and bolts. We also learned about the difference between 2D and 3D shapes and got to build towers/structures with blocks, and then present to the class about all of the different shapes that we used. Making shapes with our bodies on the floor was also fun. Some of our attempts turned out better than others. ;-) Continuing on our Math theme, we've been so excited about numeracy lately that we've begun chanting, "College work! College work!" We may be getting a little too smart for our own good. Mme decided to throw some basic variables at us and some subtraction using borrowing - not quite college work, but at least a late Grade 2/Grade 3 level for the subtraction and Grade 6 for the variables. Many of us caught on and had fun playing with the numbers during snack time. Another highlight this week was making our very own products to sell at our classroom store. We began the process last week with our big buddies. We got to peruse the materials available to us and then made a plan, deciding what we would make, what kinds of materials we would need, and how much we would charge for the items. This week we executed the plan. There were a lot of creative ideas - pencil holders, bookmarks, hats, Minecraft simulations, etc. We each got up in front of the class to present (in French!) our products, explain what they were, and tell everyone how much they cost. We were very excited to see that people actually bought the products that we created! Madame even let us keep all of the money that we earned from the sales.
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