And here we are at the end of another school year! ...a little taller, a little wiser, and with a few more holes in our mouths. ;-)
We had a great week, with "Fun Day", the Amazing Race, lots of monkey faces, a final class picnic, a game of Kick the Can, and much more! Here's one last photo drop. Happy Pride Day! Today, we remember that we accept and love all people and that it's okay to be different! In fact, we read a book with exactly that title: "It's okay to be different!" We also watched one of our favourite French YouTube groups sing a song about writing messages of hope and love on the walls, and then we did exactly that in our classroom! We brainstormed words of hope, love and acceptance and then had fun painting and decorating around them. Today was also the intermediate classes' "colour run", which involved running a course to raise money for UNICEF, followed by throwing colour packets at each other. It was a wild, noisy, coloured fog and we couldn't help but watch from a distance. It was definitely entertaining! Yesterday our Aboriginal Support Worker came to our class and introduced us to a Cree drumming song. We really enjoyed this whole process and were excited to take turns leading the song in Cree after we had practiced the words. We also learned how to say "hello" and "thank you" in Cree and were surprised to learn that most First Nations don't clap to show appreciation; instead, they hold both hands in the air, like they're ready to receive. We did our incredibly long but fun-filled walking adventure on Monday! Most people don't believe Madame when she tells them that we walked close to 9km in one day!! But we were amazing and there were (almost) no tears! We started out by planning our route on a map... Next, Madame told us that there would be hidden treasure along the way but we would have to solve a riddle to find exactly where it was located. Takaya was the first to figure out the mathematical equation! Bravo! Then it was time to head out! It was slow going on the first leg of the trip because we found a patch of salmon berries and couldn't resist trying to pick every last red, juicy berry. We also found some surprising wildlife along the way! Eventually, we made it to the Community Garden where we used our riddle to locate the treasure box. We were thrilled that Madame let us each keep one piece of treasure!... like, actually keep it!... forever! We even got to see Takaya's special little family garden plot while we were there. :-) Then it was on to Osprey Village for ice cream! Nothing but happy, sticky faces here. Especially thrilling was the fact that Madame was letting us eat dessert before lunch! Scandalous! On the walk back, we stopped at Bonson Athletic Park for a bathroom break, a picnic lunch, and a quick play on the playground. By the time we got our tired legs moving for the walk back to school, we were definitely moving slower than normal. Thanks to all the parents and daycares for waiting the extra 5-10 minutes for us after the bell and for allowing us to have this experience. We had lots to reflect on and write about it the next day. Extra photos...
We started our week with a very special art project for our dads! Shhhhh!! Our special presenter, Debbie, taught us how to make some very cool, top secret creations out of little bits of glass! She had loads of pre-cut pieces for us, but also let us use some special snippers to cut the glass even smaller if we wanted. We had so much fun with this that we were all on our best behaviour! We also had a special treat this week and got to be the audience for Mme Belson's Grade 2/3 French Immersion class while they performed some plays for us! In Math this week, we looked at the concept of capacity. How much can one water glass hold compared to another? We made some predictions. Which one would hold the MOST water?...the tall and skinny, the medium, or the small and wide? We were quite surprised to learn that all of the glasses held very close to the same amount of water, but the medium and the tall tied for holding the MOST. We had fun this week reading about volcanoes from a couple of books from the "Je lis" website that we all have access to for home reading (and will continue to be able to access over the summer): https://jelis.rkpublishing.com/student/ In one of the stories, a little boy named Alex makes a sand castle volcano. We all asked Madame, "Can we do that, too??!" And Madame said, "Yes!" We practiced lots of great vocabulary through this process - "hole", "jar", "hill", "volcano", and how to write out the steps of creating something. With our sand volcanoes, Madame didn't want to use baking soda and vinegar because she didn't want to make the sand stink for everyone else. Instead, we used alka seltzer tablets that fully dissolved. Madame wasn't even sure if it would work and called it an "experiment". In the end, it bubbled a lot but didn't actually erupt. So clearly, we needed to do a proper eruption the next day with a paper maché volcano. Our final big adventure of the week was our "Wilderness Survival" outing to the forest. Before we left, we drew up some plans of what kinds of materials we were going to use and how we were going to work together to create our structure. Many of us have incredible imaginations and figured we could put in two storeys, a door on hinges, a zipline, and various kitchen cabinetry. Madame brought us back to reality a bit and had us brainstorm how we could actually get our tarps to hang high enough in the air for us to go underneath them. In the end, we came up with some workable ideas that served as our guide when we got to Hoffman. The big day came and we set out in the pouring rain. Many of us were ill-prepared for the "atmostpheric river" that reared its ugly head on Thursday afternoon, but it was nothing that a little plastic and some creativity couldn't solve! In fact, many of us liked the idea of the plastic bag ponchos so much that we wanted one, too, despite having all our rain gear! Before we left, we read a book about playing in the rain and how much fun it can be! We were all very pumped for the trip and for the most part, didn't seem to mind the weather at all. Thank you to Kristen for some of these photos! One of our favourite parts about the whole trip was when we got to forage for salmon berries and bushwhack during our hunt. We ended up coming to a small clearing were we discovered a massive over-turned tree with all of its exposed roots. We were so fascinated with it that many of us chose to reflect about it in our journals the next day. Extra photos...
The theatrics continued this week with a special performance of "The Greatest Showman" by our Grades 4-7 students. They did an incredible job and we had so much fun watching them! We even listened to some of the movie soundtrack as we were getting ready to go out for recess. The measurement theme continues in Math, this time with a focus on measuring surface area. Since we aren't using specific units of measurement yet, we just got an overview of the concept by using recipe cards to measure and compare the surface of various things we found around the classroom - even our own bodies! We have also been continuously reviewing financial literacy concepts, just by playing our daily classroom version of "Monopoly". When Madame initially tested us on our knowledge of coins in January, there was only one student out of 20 that was able to complete the assessment correctly. We have been working on redoing the same assessment now in June (4 months later), just to compare our results, and almost all of us have completed it perfectly! (These were all done individually so that students couldn't copy off one another). It goes to show that "play" is sometimes the most powerful form of "work". In French, we are continuing to expand on our understanding of sentence-writing and story-writing, working on concepts such as where to put a period and capital letters, as well as how all good stories have a logical beginning/middle/end. We wrote our own stories about a cow and then enjoyed sharing them with the class. Some of our Kindergarten students just represented their stories through pictures, but they are still showing their understanding of beginning/middle/end. When our Kindergarten friends had a half day on Thursday, the Grade 1s got some concentrated small group time to work with Madame on creating a long story on the board. Each of us contributed a sentence to make a super silly story, working on using connecting words and all of the other sentence and story elements we've been studying. If we could write this much together, surely we could do it on our own, too! And, after Madame really pushed us Grade 1s with our writing, we decided to go on a fun adventure and do a coin-flip walk. The idea - flip a coin at every intersection. If it lands on "heads" (face), we go to the left (à gauche). If it lands on tails (pile), we go to the right (à droite). We learned some new vocabulary with the walk and also had quite the adventure of twists and turns around Pitt Meadows. By chance, we ended up near Madame's house and, since we knew that "Sensei Amy" from the after school karate program lived in Madame's complex, we decided to pay her a little surprise visit. She was more than a little shocked, but said that it absolutely made her day. And she has given Madame permission to post this photo. ;-) We played on Madame's complex playground, then headed over to 7/11 for a well-deserved treat to end our afternoon. Extra photos...
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