Happy Halloween! We kicked it off with a costume parade... It's the Mario Team! (...with Teddy and special guests: Mme Mustvedt as Mario, and Cole, Mme Van Sickle's son, as Bowser). We also enjoyed watching our big buddies and some other intermediate friends perform special Halloween dances in the gym. It was so exciting with the loud music and flashlights! Then there was pumpkin carving with Mme's special tools. (Don't worry, they're not real knives and won't cut our fingers!) For some of us, this was our first time carving a pumpkin! We took those pumpkin seeds that we extracted and did some estimating. How many seeds did we think were in the bowl?? Madame wrote down all of our answers. We had a huge variety of answers from 19 to 99 (which, mental note, we need to spend some more time on the concept of estimation). Final pumpkin seed count: 155. But that wasn't the end to our pumpkin seeds! It was time for a team challenge - who can create the most effective catapult out of nothing but popsicle sticks, spoons, and elastic bands? Once again, a huge underlying challenge was - can we contribute to the group? Can we speak kindly to our group members when we disagree? How can we compromise? Can we come up with one, unified project to present at the end? This definitely proved to be difficult in the days after Halloween when we were still recovering from a sugar comatose and lack of sleep. Emotions were running high. But we made it through and learned a lot about communication and leadership in the process. We were very proud of our final products! After we'd launched pumpkin seeds all over the classroom, what more could we do but cook them and eat them?! We LOVED the flavour with just a little margarine and garlic salt. There were a lot of exclamations of: "This is the best EVER!" Halloween always calls for Science experiments, too. We couldn't leave out Madame's favourite: "Which ice cubes will have the biggest reaction when mixed with juice?... normal frozen water, frozen Coke, or dry ice?" We made some hypotheses and took tallies of our opinions. In the end, there was no doubt that the dry ice won for biggest reaction! And we were all too happy to partake in the cold juice it created. We also had a special visit from Nana Kesler on the 31st, bringing special, personalized Halloween bags for us all. She also brought her husband with her this time and we were so excited to meet him, too! We swarmed him with questions: "Are YOU our adopted GRANDPA?!" He may still need time to consider this question... ;-) But the holidays didn't end with Halloween. We learned about the French holiday "Toussaint" (All Saint's Day) on November 1, and Día de los Muertos ("Day of the Dead") originating from Mexico, also celebrated from November 1 to 2. It seems the 31st to the 2nd is a time to celebrate the dead in cultures around the world! Extra photos...
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