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...
Our big fishing trip finally arrived! If you ask us what our favourite part was, most of us would answer "the ice cream" and "the drive there and back". But the fishing was fun, too. ;-) We didn't catch anything, but patience and coming back empty-handed are all a part of the normal fishing experience. Some of us even tried out our homemade rods! Thanks to GoFishBC, we learned so much about local fish, how BC lakes are stocked, how to tie knots, the various components of a fishing rod, how to cast, and so much more... Other fun from the trip... We did do some other things this week, too, besides the field trip!... including measurement with paper airplanes. Learning to fold a paper airplane was an exercise in patience and perseverance, for sure. But we all managed it in the end! Big "merch" to Lo for sharing her awesome design with us! We partnered up and threw our airplanes outside, then measured the distance between our plane and our partner's plane, using non-standard units (foot steps) and standard units (centimetres). Extra photos...
We're getting excited about our fishing trip next week! For our team challenge, we looked at the anatomy of a fishing rod and tried to find items around the classroom that could be used as a weight and a bobber. How could we put all of these things together to make a functional rod? We had some great ideas! Madame also brought in a real fishing rod and some of us had fun practicing how to cast with it. (Don't worry, the hook had cork on the end! Nobody was harmed in the making of these photos.) We talked about what Indigenous people used to use for fishing, before there were rods, and we learned that they would make their own spears and also weave their own nets and baskets out of grass, cedar bark, etc. Some of us tried out some weaving with hay from the guinea pigs and found that it's much more difficult than it looks! And speaking of Indigenous themes, we had an author from the Ahousaht Nation on Vancouver Island come to visit us this week. He brought his drum and sang some songs with us, and also read us a book that he wrote all about when he got his first drum. We were so excited when he gifted us our very own copy! In French, we have been learning about a new grammatical concept - nouns! Sneaky Madame has actually been teaching us subliminally all year about this concept through Show-and-Tell. Every day, we ask the presenter about the item hiding in their bag: "Is it a person? Is it an animal? Is it a place? Is it a thing?" Guess what!... these are all nouns! It was time to try out a new park for our weekly walk, and we were all begging to go back to this one! Big thanks to Aiden's grandpa for bringing extra snacks and water to share with us! At first he tried to convince us that he had brought BROCCOLI!!!... but the truth was much more exciting - gummies for everyone! Extra photos...
Our butterflies emerged from their chrysalises over the weekend and, since this particular variety of butterfly (called "painted ladies") only lives for 2 weeks, we needed to set them free right away! We loved how they tickled as they landed on us and sometimes flew away, only to circle back and land on us again. We watched a movie called "Flight of the Butterflies" and learned all about the migration patterns of monarch butterflies. We also talked about the concept of symmetry... What if we divide Callum in half?... Will he look relatively the same on both sides? We had fun using a mirror to look at various axes of symmetry, and then worked with a partner to create symmetrical designs outdoors. After learning about the butterfly's life cycle, Madame let us pick out some 3D-printed caterpillars generously given to us by Mme Cameron. We had so much fun making little habitats for them! One of the Math themes this week has been measurement! We started out by learning about non-standard units. What does it look like to measure the classroom with bodies? Why are bodies not a great unit of measurement? (Would our measurements be the same if we measured with babies? What about full-grown adults? Or NBA basketball players?) We decided that we needed some units that were consistent and tried out measuring items with paperclips and unifix cubes. From there, we were able to transition to the necessity of having a universally accepted system of measurement. We noticed that our rulers had two different types of measurement listed on them - centimetres and inches. Madame explained that centimetres are typically what we use in Canada. (Although most Canadian adults will agree that we're pretty confused in general about whether we prefer the metric or imperial systems!... a topic for when we get a little older.) We enjoyed working through the measurement of various objects on paper, and then some of us put our measurement skills to the test on this week's forest walk! For adult entertainment purposes... In French, we have begun learning about the elements of a story - beginning/middle/end, a problem/solution, characters and setting. Madame had us draw up a storyboard plan and then begin to bring our story ideas to life by coding them on Scratch Jr! Extra photos...
Well, the sad day has come in which we must say "au revoir" to our beloved chickies. They definitely brought us a lot of love, and a lot of mischief! We came in Thursday morning to find that they must have escaped the bathtub at night and partied with the classroom toys, only to sneak back to the tub before Madame arrived the next morning. They left their little footprints everywhere and we even found photographic evidence of their antics! "Hey, let's back this thing up, Marty!" Things got intense when Madame got a panicked text from the custodian that one of the chicks had managed to fly out of the tub Thursday night and get stuck in the wood chip bag. Apparently the rest of the chicks all clamoured onto the heat lamp, squawking at him, "Where did you goooo?! How did you do that?!" That was when Madame realized that it was definitely time for the farm life for these chickies. Maybe we will get to visit them some day! Au revoir, les poussins! We've been working on question words in French this week and enjoyed learning this catchy rap... We are working on how to use question marks appropriately, remembering to put a capital letter at the beginning of each new sentence, and sounding out words independently. We have also begun to learn some coding skills, with the help of a program called "Scratch Jr."! We had soooo much fun playing with the program and learning how to give various characters coded commands to do the actions that we wanted. Madame has plans for us to use it for story-writing purposes once we become familiar with all of the basic features. It's beginning to look and feel like summer this week! We loved basking in the sun on our walk to the forest this week, but then enjoying the cool shade the whole time we were there! Extra photos...
Hatch day came early! We were counting down the days to Wednesday's "due date", but were surprised when we arrived Monday morning and found a baby chick in the incubator! Since then, two more chicks emerged from their shells. "Sir Valiant", "Minuit", and "Fluffball" are all enjoying their new home in our class bathtub. They have many adoring fans. But it gets better... Farmer Crystal was wanting more chicks for her farm and it just so happened that a new shipment arrived at Bruce's Market this week. Since we have temporarily stolen her heat lamp for our classroom, she brought the new babies in to share in the bathtub love. Allow us to introduce: - Bolt - Donkey - Fluff - Poofy - Icy Pop - Wally - Hawes - Marty It has, naturally, been a chicken- and egg-themed week in class. We did some egg investigations involving measurement, weight, and would an egg float in water? How about salt water? We had fun making hypotheses, testing our theories, and adapting our tools based on different challenges that arose. We also did a directed draw of a mother hen and her chick, and are using it as a title page for the little stories we have begun writing about chicks. This week's STEM challenge was also brought to you by eggs...and birds... Can you build a nest out of materials in the forest, just like a bird? We started out by watching a video on different types of bird nests, then examined some real nests and discussed the types of materials that could work well. We decided we would need stuff that is "souple" (bendy/pliable), and "dou" (soft). Madame also told us about how Indigenous people used to use cedar bark to weave baskets, blankets, nets, etc. because it's so soft and pliable. With the help of our big buddies, we then went to the forest and attempted to construct nests of our own. The main challenge was the construction, itself, which we found out was surprisingly difficult, even with opposable thumbs! Imagine doing this with just a beak! The bonus challenge was: can your nest hold a raw egg for the entire walk back to school from the forest? Our constructions were actually pretty solid and most of the eggs made it back unscathed! Extra photos...
Monday was "Earth Day" and we decided to make a week of it. We kicked it off by watching "The Lorax", learning about the importance of trees and protecting our planet. We also read about some famous Earth heroes - Greta Thunberg, David Attenborough, and Jane Goodall - and even watched parts of their speeches/documentaries. We were especially surprised to learn that all three of these heroes are still alive! Apparently we assume that many of the world's most inspiring people came before our time, but Madame reminded us that we, too, can be inspiring people. We may be small, but our voices are mighty. Greta Thunberg proved just how much of an impact a child can have on her world. We had an eye-opening experience when Madame had us sort pictures into different categories - Garbage, Recycling or Compost? We were surprised to learn that the only items that ACTUALLY go in the garbage from our pile of pictures were candles and soiled tissues. Everything else could either be recycled or composted! We decided to put this knowledge to good use and went on a garbage hunt, collecting and then sorting all kinds of items. And we even made a poster to help inform the school community of how long it takes for various items to decompose. Madame gave us some very careful instructions on how to use a glue gun and we managed to get through this exercise without anyone burning themselves! We have had all kinds of teachers and students commenting on our poster already! They are very intrigued by our research into how long it takes each item to decompose. Keeping with the nature/Earth theme, we did some flower art this week, trying a new technique. We started by using Art Hub to draw a tulip, then traced it in coloured glue. The "pièce de résistance" was when we coloured on tinfoil and then sprayed it with water to transfer the colours to our art. We were speechless at the results! It looked soooo cool! Oh and hey, it was our "Jump Rope for Heart" day in gym class today. We wrote on our paper hearts who we wanted to dedicate our jumping to, and then kept those names in mind while we worked up a sweat! We are getting more and more excited about our chicks! Today was Day 16. (They usually hatch after 21 days). Impromptu chicken dance party... Extra photos...
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