It was "Pink Shirt Day" this week! And Madame doesn't have any photos to show for it because she was home with her sick child that day. (*insert crying emoji here*) There's an old Instagram-generation adage... "picture, or it didn't happen!" But in this case, Madame promises it happened. She found the evidence in the form of an abandoned pink t-shirt under the bench in the cubby area the next day. Rather than focusing on "anti-bullying", Wednesday's "Pink Shirt Day" was focused on kindness. We had a virtual assembly where we learned about the history behind Pink Shirt Day, listened to fellow students read poems about kindness, and watched several cute videos about the impact that being kind can have on those around us. Video links, in case you want to check them out yourself: Story of Pink Shirt Day: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=noxd3pFXfNA Kindness Boomerang: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nwAYpLVyeFU Dog and Bird short film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nqRpNjbWCp4 We have spent a great deal of time this week reading books and talking about kindness in the classroom. What does it look like? How can we show kindness in small (and big) ways? Today we did a collaborative art piece to demonstrate that each of us is an important part of a large picture. "Let's be friends." - watercolors on photocopy paper, by Division 23 If we're being honest, most of us didn't understand the "large picture" metaphor that Madame was getting at with this piece of art (she gets a little too philosophical sometimes, but we love her anyway)... Still, working on a large project together always serves as a perfect stage for practicing kindness: taking turns, being gracious about others' contributions, speaking kindly even when we disagree, trying not to get upset when someone does something unexpected, etc. It is as they say - everything I need to know, I learned in Kindergarten (*cough*...or Grade 1). In Math, we continue to work on subtraction. We played a fun game this week where we dumped a pre-determined number of lava rocks out of a flower pot. Any that landed outside of the hoop on the ground were subtracted from our total. In this way, we continually practiced creating, writing, and solving subtraction equations. We also began an inquiry project in Social Studies. It's kind of on trend during the winter to study an Arctic animal in the primary grades. But everyone does penguins and polar bears. So instead, we decided to go with narwhals! Madame told us a secret... even into her adult life (though she refused to say how recently), she believed that narwhals were mythical creatures. They're the unicorns of the sea!...And everyone knows that unicorns aren't real! Imagine her surprise when she spotted a National Geographic magazine with a picture of a boy in Nunavut standing near a narwhal. "Wait... they're real?" And so, like any good teacher, Madame was determined that we should not grow up to follow in her ignorant footsteps. And a unit was born. We generated a bunch of questions that we had about narwhals while Madame quickly translated and wrote them into a web on the board. The web has stayed up all week as we slowly discover and add more answers to our questions. We have been learning about using different sources of information when we are researching. One student suggested, "Why don't we just Google it?" But then we thought about all of the other places that we could ALSO find information... ancient texts called "books", modern sources of information like YouTube, and yeah... Googling it. We were surprised to hear, though, that not everything on the Internet gives you REAL information! So we were careful with our Internet sources and checked out National Geographic Kids and the World Wildlife Fund for information. We are really enjoying this inquiry and Jackson even went home and found a book on his own with some information that he was able to share with us! Oh yeah, and we did some forest stuff this week in the snow... This is "Bob", the green bug...(he's in there somewhere)... ...we made him an apartment fit for a king...and then we lost him. Don't let your eyes deceive you. This is not Logan. It's a stick-eating dinosaur. He's fierce. We're pretty pumped because the "big kids" have been letting us play soccer with them at recess. So Madame brought a ball and let us practice some skills on our own in the forest.
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