What better way to spend one of our last days at school than lounging in forts in pajamas?? We also enjoyed being part of the nostalgia train for the outgoing Grade 7s and the Grade 12 grads! Several of us made signs and we all lined the hallways with other classes to cheer for all of these students as they got ready for their rite of passage to the next stage of their lives. Some day it will be us walking those halls! We were also happy to honour Nana Kesler with a "thank you" card for all the amazing things she has done for us this year! And then of course, she gave something right back to us!... adorably personalized bags of chips, and super cute "worry worms" that she crocheted herself. Her kindness and generosity never ends! Extra photos... Thank you again, everyone, for such a fun year! Have an amazing summer!
We survived the heat on our big walk for ice cream! We would like to give a shout-out to water spouts, pool noodles, and Sam's bags of ice for creating all kinds of cooling-down fun! Never mind the ice cream, even just the walk to the park provided some tasty treats along the way. Hello, beautifully ripened salmon berries! It was a mini feast. After the berry-picking, we went treasure-hunting. Though not a true geocache experience, it gave us the flavour of it. Earlier in the week, we had plotted various routes to our destination on a map, learning about the compass rose and the various symbols on a map. (Can we walk along the dotted lines? Why are some parts green? Can we just draw a line straight from our starting point to the end? Can we go along that blue path?) In the end, we realized that there were many ways to get to the same place, but we chose what we thought would be the most efficient route. And after following our maps to the community garden, we used a clue to help us find the exact plot where our treasure box was hidden. We were thrilled to be able to all pick out a piece of treasure to bring home the next day. Hopefully some of us will be inspired to download the geocache app and try some real "treasure hunting" with our families. And then there was lots of playground fun, and of course... ice cream! And... why did the chicken cross the road??... to get to Mme Van Sickle's classroom, of course! Huge thanks to Farmer Crystal for bringing some of our favourite chickens back to visit us, now almost fully grown! We were amazed at how different they looked from when we used to snuggle them in the classroom! But they still had their distinct personalities - Fluffball loved ear scratches (yes, chickens have ears!) and snuggles; Bolt loved to bolt. We also finished up our Scratch Jr. projects this week and had some free time to try playing Minecraft Education. Belle came to the rescue as our resident expert on all things Minecraft! She definitely knew way more than Madame. Mme Abby's class also worked on some projects this week - dioramas showing various predators and prey. We loved touring through their classroom, finding some familiar faces from the playground, and listening to the students explain their projects to us in French. They did an amazing job! We also had a ton of fun with our "Guinea Pig Olympics" this week! And with our play performances. We were so excited to perform for our families and we did a phenomenal job! (Links to videos from the play were sent out via e-mail). Extra photos...
It was fun day today! And guess what!... we had fun!! But the fun wasn't just reserved for Friday. There have been lots of great experiences this week! A special ocean dome came to the school on Monday and we got our own little private iMax experience! The group who brought the dome also had loads to teach us about local animals and tropical animals. We were thrilled with the hands-on learning and had so many great questions! In Math, we deepened our knowledge of shapes this week by learning about the differences between 2D and 3D shapes. We created all kinds of different shapes out of toothpicks and marshmallows, and even realized that we could combine shapes to create various structures. "Look, Madame! It's a house!" "I made a fire pit for roasting marshmallows!" "Mine's a car!" "I made a chair!" So many great ideas... A couple of weeks ago, we did some drawings and sent them off to the high school for one of the art classes to replicate with clay. The results were way better than we could have expected! So, so cool!! A huge "mercy" to Carla, the art teacher, for spearheading this project and to the high schoolers for doing such an amazing job! Some of them were even former PME students! The high schoolers came to us on Wednesday with their gifts and then we enjoyed learning some origami techniques with them, as well. It has been an art-filled week, as we are also making backgrounds/sets for our upcoming play performances, and have been prepping obstacles for the annual "Guinea Pig Olympics" next week. And we tried out a new playground! The jury's still out on whether it's as good as the other one we've been going to, but we definitely had a fun time! We also learned to play a new game this week!... Pokèmon! Ok, so it's not really a "new" game, but most of us who collect cards don't actually know how to play the game by its true rules. Madame invited some special guest speakers - her two sons - to walk us through how to play. A game board isn't really needed, but it gives us a visual for organizing the cards. It turns out that this is an amazing game for practicing our reading and math skills! Extra photos...
Hey, hey crazy hair day! This week in Math has been brought to us by SHAPES! We started out by naming all of the shapes that we could think of in French. ...and then had fun finding and sorting as many shapes as we could. We organized them into rows and compared their lengths. Whose shape won for the longest?! And in playing with our shapes, many of us discovered that we could combine smaller shapes to make a completely different larger shape! We went on a scavenger hunt around the classroom, tallying and comparing the different kinds of shapes we found. Did you know that circles and rectangles are EVERYWHERE?! Then we took our shape quest outside! We discovered that not all shapes come in the standard form we would expect. Lo realized that there are a whole lot of elongated octagons around the playground! Madame told her that in all her years of doing outdoor shape hunts, nobody has ever recognized these benches as octagons! Bravo, Lo! We even started creating shapes during play time with the toys. "Madame! Look, it's a losange (rhombus)"! And Madame introduced us to her "Mambo Number 5" French shapes parody! Careful!...it's tricky to keep up! In other news, the rain clouds finally lifted and we spent an afternoon at the park again! Even Sam and Alma the dog got in on the play time action. :-) It was also the colour run/party for the Intermediates today and we had fun watching the chaos! Madame tried to spot her own daughter, but couldn't see her through all the colour clouds. Thanks to Belle's mom for finding her and snapping a photo! We did manage to find one of our lunch monitors and some of Madame's former students. We can't wait until it's our turn to take part in this annual event! Extra photos...
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