A Special Guest - Ms. Gelson

Today Ms. Lirenman came to school with a teacher friend named Ms.Gelson. Ms. Gelson knows a lot about books and loves to share books with everyone she can.  Since we love books too she was a perfect visitor for us.

Here is Ms. Gelson reading to us. In fact she read to us three times today! What a wonderful day it was.

Music

Twice a week we have music with Mrs. Radcliffe. Here are some pictures of us in music class.  Do you take music at your school?

Good News Bad News

Today we continued to work on our collaborative project with Mrs. van Rees' class in Ontario.  We saved the illustrations that they saved in dropbox and put them into iMovie. We decided which order the pictures had to go in and we created Good News Bad News stories from their images.  Here are a few pictures of us hard at work.

Look at Our Seeds!

A crazy thing happened to our pocket seeds. We put them in the window for a couple of weeks and they grew! Many of us have written about them on our blogs so please be sure to check them out.

The Mirror Game

At the end of the day we did a little drama. The game we played was called the mirror game.  To play this game one person makes slow movements and the person across from them is their mirror.  When you are a mirror you have to follow the movements that your partner is making just like a mirror would. It was fun.  Ms.Lirenman tells us she has many more drama games to teach us.  Here are some pictures of us playing the mirror game.

Where do you like to write?

Ms. Lirenman lets us work where ever we want in the classroom.  Look where some of us headed today.

What are some of the interesting places that you have worked?

Word Problems in Words, Pictures, and Numbers

On Wednesdays we lend out our iPads to Mrs. Morrison's grade one class next door.  So instead of having our math choice stations we created our own math stories.  First we wrote a story, then we drew the story, and finally we answered the story with a math number sentence.

Here are a couple of our  stories.

Rain Poems

Today is Victoria Day in Canada so we don't have school.  People are still thinking about us though because today we received a very special  voice messages from Mrs. D's kindergarten class in Vermont.  Please take the time to enjoy their poems about rain.  Ms. L certainly did.

listen to ‘A Poem About Rain’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘Zeina Shares A Poem About Rain’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘Rose Shares a Poem on Rain’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘Chase Share a Poem About Rain’ on Audioboo

listen to ‘Patrick Share a Poem on Rain’ on Audioboo

A Lost Voice Message

Back in December we received a voice message from Ms. Lirenman's friend Mrs. Reid.  Some how that voice message never left Ms. L's iPod and it is only now that she's realizing this. Yikes!  Here is the message we received from Mrs. Reid. Better late than never right?

listen to ‘Mrs. E. Reid Says Hello!’ on Audioboo

What's So Special About this Photo?

Today while Yaksh was reading this book Eldon turned to his friends and said, "you know if you cover the e in the word planets you get the word plants". We were all so impressed with what he noticed especially because right now we are learning about plants. What word discoveries have you made lately?

Writing Our Friends in Guatemala

Today we wrote letters to our new friends in Guatemala.  Did you know that Guatemala is in Central America?  Before we started writing we talked about some of the things we thought our new friends would want to know about us.  Then with many ideas in our heads we started to write our letters.  As you can see by the pictures we like to write all over our classroom.  We are excited to send our letters to them but we are just as excited to receive their letters for us too.  When we both get each others letters we are going to Skype with them so we can meet them through the computer.  We can't wait!

Showing Our Plant Knowledge with the Haiku Deck App

Today during big buddies we created really cool presentations using the app called Haiku Deck. It's a free iPad app.  Here are some photos of us working together with our buddies. Stay tuned for our final products.

Parts of Plant Expert

Today we received some new books about parts of a plant. In groups of three we read the books and became experts on one part of a plant. Then each group shared their knew knowledge with the rest of the class.  Here are some of us working hard to become experts.

Flat Stanley Had Arrived From South Africa

Our second Flat Stanley has arrived to spend some time with us at school. This Flat Stanley has come all the way from South Africa.  Today we took him into the gym with us. He managed to get himself into a lot of trouble. Thankfully it was good trouble not bad trouble.

Our Latest Collaborative Project

Today we started working on a special project.  A while back we read the book Good News Bad News by Jeff Mack. In it the two characters deal with good news and bad news through out the story.  Ms. Lirenman has been talking with Mrs. van Rees (in Ontario) since the beginning of the school year about finding a writing project that we could do together.  And then it hit her.  We could make our own version of the story.  Ms. L and Mrs van Rees chatted back and forth on Twitter and came up with a plan.  Here's our plan.  

In our class we are working in groups of two or three to create a good news bad news story.  Then we are going to illustrate the story that we have in mind.  Ms. L is going to help us save our photos into a shared dropbox file that Mrs van Rees has set up.  Her class is going to do the exact same thing.

Here are some photos of us planning our story with the good news and bad news elements.

Once we had our ideas, or as Ms. Lirenman put it our story boards, we go busy creating the illustrations for our stories.

Ms. Lirenman then saved all our illustrations into our special dropbox folders. Once Mrs. van Rees' students have finished their illustrations we are going to swap folders. Mrs. van Rees' kids are going to write good news and bad news stories from our pictures and we are going to write good news bad news stories from theirs. Be sure to stay tuned.

Learning with others is so much fun.

Learning About Plants

This afternoon we started to learn about plants.  The first thing we did was write down what we know about plants. We did it on a special website called Padlet.com.  It's a great place to write your ideas down instead of having your teacher write all your ideas down.

This is what we know about plants.

Created with Padlet

This is what we wonder about plants.

Created with Padlet

Over the next few weeks we hope to get our wonders answered.

Photos of Us Using Padlet