Chinese New Year

Today we spent some time learning about Chinese New Year.  In the morning we created a special project which we can't share with you until Friday.  

After recess we worked on Chinese New Year Banners with the Chinese Numbers 1-10.  We also played with Augmented Reality again with a really cool colouring page.  On Friday our plan is to dress in Chinese clothing, red or gold, or wear something with a horse on it.  Here are some photos from our day.

Ringette

This afternoon we were very lucky to have a guest in to teach us about the sport of ringette.   We learned about the important safety features and special equipment that you must wear to play the game. She even showed us her helmet and face mask.  At first it looked like a regular ice hockey helmet but then we saw the face mask part had triangles instead of squares so that the end of the stick couldn't get through the mask.  In the picture below we are listening very carefully.  Ms. Lirenman was very proud of us.

We then learned how to hold the stick, making sure our thumbs were facing the right way.

Then we had a ring that we practiced passing between our partner.  Sometimes the ring went really fast which made it hard to catch with the stick, but other times we were successful.  Here are some photos of us passing the ring back and forth.

We ended our session by playing a go/stop game. We had to push the ring forward along the gym floor every time we saw the go sign, and we had to stop immediately when we saw the stop sign.  It was a fun game.

PE was over way too quickly today but thankfully she'll be back next Thursday to teach us some more.

Looking Closely at an Owl Pellet

Lately Wednesdays have become our day to explore a little deeper and today was no exception.  Way back on Halloween Ms. Lirenman was given an owl pellet for us to explore.  So many things happened since then and today we finally found the time to dive into the owl pellet.

We started our day with Ms. Lirenman showing us the owl pellet. We used the table magnifier to check it out.  A big thank you to My Classroom Needs for donating the $$ to pay for these.

Many of us had curiosity questions so Ms. Lirenman introduced us to the website Today's Meet where we could share some of our wonders and ask questions.  Some of us worked together and others worked on our own.  

Here is some of what we wrote.

Then Ms. Lirenman put the owl pellet under the document camera, zoomed in real big and slowly started to pull the owl pellet apart.  We were amazed by what we saw.  She then divided all that was found into eight stations and we rotate through each station with a couple of friends. We had our own individual magnifying classes so we could look a little closer.  Another huge thank you to My Class Needs for donating the money to purchase these too.  We also brought our iPads around with us so we could capture some documentation.  Here are some photos of that.

Here are some of the things we saw up close.

One student suggested that maybe we could find a skeleton of a mouse and project it on the screen so we could compare what we were seeing with where it might be found on the skeleton.  Ms. Lirenman loved the idea and quickly found us this skeleton.  It was exciting to recognize bones right in front of us to bones on the skeleton picture.

When it was time to head outside Ms. Lirenman collected all the samples and put them in our special magnifying containers which we also received from My Class needs.  Now we can revisit the owl pellet over and over again for a while.

After lunch we continued with our Owl Pellet day by taking our images and labelling them using the iPad app Skitch, and then creating a collage using the PicCollage app  Here are a few photos of us doing just that.

These images below are some screen shots from our student blogs but you really should go check out our individual blog posts.

At the end of the day we returned to the Today's Meet  and added comments about what we learned or saw in the owl pellet.  Here are some of those comments.

As you can see it was an extremely successful day of looking closely and exploring owl pellets.  We can't wait to see what we get up to next Wednesday.

Aboriginal Story Telling

Today Mr. Bandura came to visit.  He shared stories with us. One story was about how the stars got into the sky.  While he told his story he used his drum and he sang. He was a good singer.  In the last photo we were making wolf sounds. It was fun to learn with him.

A Question from Mrs. Schnare's Class

Yesterday we received a voice message from Mrs. Schnare's class at Surrey Central Elementary.  Listen to what they asked us.

listen to ‘Mrs. Schnare's Class’ on Audioboo

Writing

Have you ever wondered what we look like when we are focused on our writing? Take a look.

Learning About Families

This afternoon Ms. Lirenman showed us a Discovery Education movie about families.  Although it was right near the end of the day Ms. L created a padlet and we shared some of the things we learned about families.

Here are some photos of us adding to the padlet. 

Here is the padlet we created in the last five minutes of our school day.

Created with Padlet