It's Spring Break!

If you're wondering why our blog will be quiet for the next couple of weeks it's because we are on Spring Break.  Feel free to snoop around while we are away, and leave us comments too if you'd like. We'll be sure to respond to them when we are together again on April 2nd.

Making Magnets

On Friday before Spring Break, after looking at magnets several times over the term, we decided it was time for us to make our own magnets.  To do this we put a nail on a strong magnet and kept it there for over 100 seconds. We counted by ones to get there. Then we removed the nail from the magnet and tried to see if it could work. Check the photos below to see how it turned out.

The question is... do you know why it worked? We do!

Projects by Jen - Lucky Charms Counting

On Thursday,  we were invited to join five other classrooms in a Skype conference call to take part in the Projects By Jen Lucky Charms Project.

To begin with, this was the first time we had ever used Skype with more than one class. We usually use google hang out so this was a new experience. It worked well for the most part except we couldn't see (only hear) two of the classes and some of the classes were dropped.  But it didn't really matter because it is great to learn with others.

We listened to most of a story read by a teacher librarian from one of the schools.

Then it was time to sort. We were each given our own bag of Lucky Charms cereal and we had to sort the different marshmallows.

After we finished sorting we tallied what we discovered.

We then brought our tallies to Ms. Lirenman so she could add them to our class tally chart.

We also added our results to here.

When we finished our sorting we skyped again with Ms. Rose's kindergarten class in Winnipeg, Manitoba. The following morning we shared our data with Mrs. Cassidy's class in Moose Jaw.  At first we were all surprised to see so many "moons" in our collection until some one told us that the moons are new and there are in a promotion right now.  That made their large number make much more sense.

What can you notice about the data shared?

A Secret Project

We are working on a secret project with teachers and students from around North America.  We can't tell you what it is but what we can tell you is that it has to do with this song.

Square Cat by Elizabeth Schoonmaker

When we made our video about our classroom and shared it with the world an author named Elizabeth Schoonmaker was impressed with it and wanted to send us a copy of her book.  Ms. Lirenman got in touch with her and today we received a surprise package in the mail. It was addressed to our class and inside there were TWO copies of her book Square Cat and some special Square Cat fan cards.  What a wonderful surprise.

When we opened the book and started to read it we were shocked (in a good way) to see this writing inside one of the books.

We've never had an author sign a book especially for us! How exciting.  The second book was signed to our school and we are going to make sure it goes into our school library so all the children can read it.

Thank you so much Elizabeth Schoonmaker for thinking of us and sending us this great new book.  We will do something for you we promise, and hopefully it will be before we leave for school holidays on Friday, but just in case it isn't we want you to know that we are very thankful for this new book.

We really like Eula and we loved what her friends did for her.  The book made us smile.

Thank you!

Gold Toss

Today are principal and vice principal decided to hold a gold coin toss in honour of St. Patrick's Day. All the classes had a turn to toss gold coins into a black pot on a rainbow. The person who landed closest to the pot of gold (or landed right in the pot of gold) got a special green necklace. We all received a special treat too.

Guess Who Were The Big Buddies Today?

Today we were the big buddies for grade two students. Since we are the expert bloggers we were showing them how to log into kidblog, how to write a post, and how to publish a post. We were pretty proud being the big buddies even though we are only in grade one.

Turning Books into Movies

We have almost finished turning all of our special books into movies for our collaboration project with our really, really, big high school buddies.

Here are some of them. We have also put the ones we've been involved with on our individual blogs.

We Have Finished our Collaborative Books with Our High School Big Buddies

This week we finally finished making our collaborative books in Book Creator.  If you remember a while back (before Christmas in fact) we sent ideas of stories to our new friends at Fraser Heights Secondary. Ms. Lees students took our ideas and wrote stories for us based on our ideas.  Then they sent them back to us and for the past several weeks, when time has permitted and we were healthy enough to be at school, we have been working on illustrating the stories using the Draw and Tell app, and creating the books in Book Creator.

Not only did we draw the illustrations, but we also created the books, retyped the stories, and chose how they would look.  We were going to add voice to these stories too but decided instead to take screen shots and create little movies of us reading the stories.  Those are not finished yet but should be soon.

If you own an iOS device, and have Book Creator and DropBox on your device you can check out what we've created.  There are seven books in all, and they are all stored in this one dropbox folder.  All you have to do is download the file and open it in Book Creator. Hopefully you can open and read them and check out all of our hard work.  If you can't don't worry, once our movies are finished Ms. Lirenman will put them here on the blog so you'll be able to watch them instead.

We are excited to see where this collaborative project is heading.  After spring break we will be going on a field trip to the high school to meet these children that we've been working with.  In addition Ms. Oakland's drama class will be performing these stories to us.  This is all very exciting for us (and we think for the big kids too).  Stay tuned for more details.

Forces Passing Through Objects

Today in science we explored with magnets again. This time we tried to predict which objects our magnet would work through and which ones it wouldn't. We were quite surprised to see which objects magnetism CAN pass through. Have you ever tried this before?

Learning with Duck Duck Moose

Today we were very lucky because the makers of our favourite app Draw and Tell skyped into our classroom.  At first we had a lot of trouble though because we could hear them but they could not hear us.  We have this trouble a lot but today it was the worst it has been.  Ms. Lirenman had us blog about what was happening while she tried to fix the problem.  Thankfully the problem got fixed when she restarted her computer.  We were very patient.



 Once we got our technology working Duck Duck Moose shared with us how they create apps. We learned about how they first talk to kids, and ask them what they want. Then they brainstorm ideas. Next they have ilustrators who draw the images, and they use animators to make images move. They record special music too. They use a lot of engineers to design the apps and program the special codes. Once the apps are ready they let classrooms try them out before they go on sale in the App Store. They even said if we lived closer to them they would visit us and ask us to help try them out. They live in California, we live in British Columbia.



After we learned about how to make apps we asked them some of our wonder questions. We wondered about how they made the pretty pictures, and told them some of the pretty pictures we liked. We wondered if we could take a photo right inside Draw and Tell. We wondered if we could type in Draw and Tell. We had many other wonders. They listened to all of us and answered our wonders.





Next we got to show them some of the things we've been doing on our iPads using their Draw and Tell app. That was pretty fun for us too.



When it was all finished we grabbed our iPads and blogged about the experience. Here is some of what we learned today.   Angelo Eldon  Kaleb Nicky Zahra  Please check out all of our individual blogs.

We are are very thankful for this opportunity even if our technology did not work for a long time in the beginning.  Learning with others is the best way to learn!

Thank you Duck Duck Moose for spending some of your morning with us. We learned a lot from you.  :-) 

Using StoryBird

On the weekend Ms. Lirenman found out the StoryBird has changed their website and so now it works with iPads too! She was very excited and had to show us right away. Today during computer we played with StoryBird so that we could show our big buddies this afternoon how to use the website.

Here are a few pictures of us teaching our big buddies about this wonderful website.