Merry Christmas!! It has been an action-packed 5 days leading up to the holidays! Every day, we have come with stories about our "elf on the shelf"'s antics, tales of our visits with Santa, and calculations/debates of precisely how many days are left until Christmas... "No, but you can't count today!"... "Yes, you have to count today because it's only the morning!" We really enjoyed getting our Christmas Spirit on with a sing-along with Mme Paschalis' Grade 1/2 class. Madame Van Sickle decided to embrace that Christmas spirit, too, by doing a science experiment with candy canes. Which one would change the most?...the one in cold water, hot water, vinegar, or oil? We made our hypotheses and then tested our theories. We set a timer for 5 minutes and then observed the changes. The hot water was the winner! Almost all of the colour had dissolved. Vinegar was next, followed by cold water, both of which had completely dissolved the candy canes by the end of the day. The oil did nothing!...nada!...zilch! We spent some time prepping our props for our Winter production this week, too! And in the end, we did such an amazing job on our performances! We should definitely be proud of ourselves! Below is a video of the production. It's posted as a protected link so that it can't be searched on YouTube - it's only accessible for people who have the link. Nana Kesler also spoiled us this week with individualized homemade ornaments and treats! She really is the BEST adopted grandmother ever!! And so talented, too! And even though we were a little late celebrating this holiday, we wanted to recognize "St. Lucia's Day" (traditionally celebrated on Dec. 13). It's a holiday that originates from Sweden, where our friend Lo's family is from! We listened to a story all about the traditions surrounding the day and then did our own little St. Lucia procession wearing the paper crowns that we made. Lo's mom even made us some traditional pepparkakor, a Swedish treat! It was so yummy! And since we're celebrating all the things, we couldn't leave out Mexican Christmas! ...especially since Liliana's dad is from Mexico! Originally, we were planning to make our own piñata for this event, but our homemade efforts met a tragic demise when the balloon inside the paper maché popped before it could all dry. But there's no problem that a little creativity (and the Dollar Store) can't fix! And while they were far from being traditional Mexican Christmas piñatas, we really didn't care about the appearance. We were far more concerned with the content. Extra photos...
We had so much fun on our big outing this week to the high school to make Christmas sweaters out of clay! It was a long walk there and back, but none of us complained even once. Champs! We loved working with the high schoolers and had so many creative ideas for our little projects! Meeting "Swim Shady"... ![]() It was an artsy week! We also worked on making ourselves into reindeer to decorate our classroom door. We learned all about Kwanzaa, too, and practiced drawing a "kinara" - one of the symbols of Kwanzaa. We loved dancing around to some African music throughout the week in honour of this celebration. Nana Kesler brought us some fun little items for making Christmas crafts and Madame left them out for us to use as our imaginations saw fit. Among the items were some sweet little jingle bells. Nana Kesler likely never envisioned those bells turning us into punk rockers. But it just goes to show that our imaginations can be sparked in many different ways and there is not one "correct" way to use an item. These bells inspired a whole lot of out-of-the-box crafting by us, boys! We read a book about how in Mexico, they celebrate Christmas for 9 days and have a party with a piñata. This idea sounded pretty great to us, so Madame let us get knee-deep (almost literally) in some paper maché. Just as fun as making the piñata was the clean-up process afterward! There were many gleeful expressions of: "This is more fun than the piñata!" Give the children sponges and a spray bottle and magical things happen... And the book fair was this week! So many fun things to see and buy and inspire us! Extra photos...
"Dreidel, dreidel, dreidel... I made it out of clay!" ...we all have this ear worm after learning about Hannukah this week! And if we were going to sing about dreidels made out of clay, we were going to MAKE dreidels out of clay. But we decided to use some pre-made dreidels for trying out the game with our big buddies. It was a hit! So much fun to be had with such a little toy. We were so inspired that we came up with a design all on our own for perler bead dreidels and some of us even started writing Hebrew letters all over other projects. Our dreidels served as a great springboard for learning all about the origins of Hannukah. We found Israel on a map and some of us remarked that we had heard the grown-ups talking about a war happening in that country right now. Madame was able to have a delicate (and very simplified) conversation with us about how just like sometimes we, as children, get into arguments, sometimes powerful people who lead countries/groups get into arguments, too, and they are not able to find good strategies for getting along. We are hoping that Israel and the Palestinians find peace very soon. An interesting fact about Hannukah is that it follows the Lunar calendar (it's based on the moon!) so the dates change every year. This ties in well with what we have been learning about the moon. All these crazy facts about space are so mind-blowing! Did you know??... the Earth is constantly spinning and does one full rotation every 24 hours, which is how we get our days! But while that spinning is happening, the Earth is also slowly rotating around the sun every 365 days, giving us our measurement for one year. But, wait!... there's more!... while all THAT is happening, Earth's moon is spinning around our planet every 29.5 days, giving us our months! And all of this...just...happens. Every day. Like while we're sitting here eating our fishy crackers and bear paws, we are actually spinning in space. *Minds blown* We had to act it all out, of course! Another crazy fact!... the moon doesn't actually give off its own light. It just reflects the sun's light! We had fun replicating this in different ways... with a mirror and flashlight, with a bouncy ball, etc. And since we're learning about the moon, why not have an outer-spaced themed STEM project? Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to give your two aliens (les extra-terrestres) a safe and soft landing on the moon. Here are your materials! And, go! Some of us were so excited about our group project that we spontaneously came up with a cheer! :-) This was particularly a win because we started out having disagreements about design and whose turn it was to take charge, but we were able to figure out how to speak with each other respectfully and make compromises, and in the end we were so happy with our successful results! And we are happy to report that all aliens landed on the moon unscathed. We also spent some time in the forest this week again, discovering all kinds of different mushrooms, finding "fairy houses", building homesteads, and playing tag. We were having so much fun that even Madame didn't want to leave and luckily we got back to school 1 minute before the bell rang. Extra pics...
It's been a week of new experiences for many of us! On Wednesday, we did our first "forest walk". We began by gathering for a land acknowledgment in French, which we have memorized incredibly well! We remember that it is a privilege to run and play freely on land that used to belong to the Katzie people. Madame also went all "Fred Penner" and brought her ukulélé for us to sing "Dans la forêt", an adapted version of "Down by the Bay" that has us singing about all kinds of strange things we may see in the forest! Some of us enjoyed trying out the ukulélé ourselves afterward. And it was time for some old-school play!... making sling-shots out of sticks, building forts with branches and other items we gathered, rolling over logs and discovering worms and bugs... We even discovered what we dubbed "ancient sticks"... smooth sticks that had lines etched into them, almost like someone had drawn on them with a carving tool. We also got to try roller-blading on Thursday! This was a new experience for many of us and we were very grateful for the support (literally!) from our big buddies. Some of us made amazing progress in the short 45 minutes that we were rolling around the gym. And it's a new month! And not just any new month... it's December! Woohoo!! (Bring on the chocolate advent calendars!) Seeing as it's the darkest month of the year, Madame decided that it's time we started tracking the moon's cycles. We love the moon light that Madame put up by our class rainbow, which can display the basic shape of the moon as it is currently. Every day for the month of December, we will record the moon's shape on our tracking sheet. Extra photos...
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