A Celebration of Success!

This morning instead of having our usual Friday morning community read Ms. Lirenman opened our classroom early and provided breakfast treats for us and our families. It was a way to celebrate all of our successes of the term.  The room was a buzz of reading, chatting, smiles, and giggles.  Little brothers and sisters, parents, grandparents and out town uncles had the chance to meet each other in a comfortable environment.  Our principal even stopped by. We shared our  book box books as well as some of our favourite iPad books and reading websites.  It was a wonderful way to start the last day of the 2014 school year. Here are some photos from this morning.

Cookies!

On Thursday we made cookies. Between morning and recess we made the dough. 

Between recess and lunch we rolled the dough, created the cookies with the cookie cutters, and baked the cookies. 

After lunch we decorated some of the cookies.  

It is Monday. What are you reading?

Last night Ms. Lirenman read a great blogpost that encouraged her to ask us what we are reading.  Today some of us added what we are reading to this padlet so the rest of the class could see. We had a bit of technical difficulties this time around but a few of us were able to talk about the books we were reading today. Here are some of the books we are reading this week.

Created with Padlet

Guess What Arrived Today?

Today we had some very special guests arrive in Mme Douwes room. Can you guess what they are?

They live in here.

The water is very cold and must stay cold in order for them to grow.

Do you know?

They are...

Salmon eggs!

Over the next few weeks the eggs will start to hatch. Stay tuned.

When the Power Goes Out the Show Must Go On...

On Friday after music we were scheduled to have a Mystery Number Skype with a class in Texas.  Unfortunately during music the power in the school went off, and this included our access to the school internet.  Since we couldn't use Skype Ms. Lirenman had to quickly think of a different way we could make the connection work.  

Ms. Lirenman decided that we would try to use Voxer a walkie talk, text messaging type app.  She contacted the teacher in Texas and we were off.  

With Voxer you can leave little messages (in our case we left questions about numbers) and then they can leave little answers for us. We went back and forth asking and answering questions.  In the end we were able to guess their secret number and they were able to guess our.  Here's what it sounded like.

listen to ‘Mystery Number Via Voxer’ on audioBoom

Reading Around the Room

From a far we looked like this today.

But close up we looked more like this...

Melton and the Warm Hearted Snowman

Wow! What a show! This afternoon and this evening we wowed our audiences in our perfornace of Melton the Warm Hearted Snowman.  The show included all the kindergarten to grade three students in both French and English.  It was a huge success with a lot of thanks going to Mr. Johnson our music teacher.  Here is one photo from our morning concert as we were singing Tough Love with Mme Kell's, Mme Douwes', and Ms. Swenson's classes. Unfortunately Ms. Lirenman had to fuzz out the students in those classes because she doesn't have permission for them to be on our blog.  But she did her best to keep us clear. We are in the row second from the top.

The Hour of Code

Today we dipped our toes into the hour of code.  Some of us practiced coding using the code.org Frozen tutorial and some of us tried the Flappy Birds tutorial.  We all have a sign up and password for both of these tutorials inside our planner pocket.  Some of us decided to just use the iPad app Kodable or Tynker.  We still have a few more programming apps and sites to explore until we find the one that is just right for each of us.  Here are some pictures of our coding afternoon.

Practicing for Our Musical with Friends Far Away

Next week we are part of a K-3 musical called Melton the Warm Hearted Snowman.  We have three songs to sing in the show and we have been practicing a lot.  This week we went so far as to practice our songs with our friends in Ms. DeGroot's class in Iowa.  They also sang us their songs for their Christmas concert.  It was a fun way to practice and to share our singing with each other.  Here are some photos from our call.

 

In Class PE?

This afternoon our gym was busy between preparing for our big musical on Tuesday, and the parent fund raising gift store. Because of both of those things we were not able to get into the gym for our PE. But have no fear we ended up doing a boot camp in our classroom.  We rotated stations around the room.  Here's what it looked like.

Besides your in class brain breaks, or daily physical excercise do you ever have PE in your classroom?

Learning About Aboriginal Story Telling

Today Ms. Vaillancourt visited us. She read Immi's GIft by Karin LIttlewood to us.

It was about a little girl who ice fished and kept fishing out unique items which she used to decorate her igloo.  Different animals came to see her igloo too because it was so unique and was the ost colourful one around. When then created our own illustrations of what Immi's igloo might look like.  This is Ms. V's sample.

These are some of the igloos we made.

It was great to learn with Ms. V this morning.

Lines in Nature

While Mr. Jones was here a couple of weeks ago we worked on looking at lines in nature. This is what we created.