Learning Aboriginal Stories with Ms. D

Today we have a special visitor, Ms. D.  She is here to tell us stories. Our first story is about a frog that drank all the water.  

The lesson we learned from this story was that you should only take what you need.

The second story was told with a drum.

With the drum she told us a legend about how the mosquitos came to be.

Then she told us a third story about bears and about the Big Bear of the Sky.

After we pretended to be a raven to help our bodies move.  

The next story she shared with us was about a boy teaching a song that only the elders knew. The elders didn't want the boy to teach them though. In the story the boys end up in the sky as stars called the Seven Star Dancers of the Sky.

The final story was about the coyote trickster. He liked to look at all the pretty girls. He showed off in front of the pretty girls by playing with his eyeballs.  In the end he threw his eyeball all the way into the heavens and it stuck there so he could see all the pretty girls of the world.

Design Challenge 4 and 5

We have two more design challenges.  Challenge #4 is to create and add a Lego extension to Dash that will hold a pen and then program her to draw shapes.  

Challenge #5 is to use paper cups and build a tower that is 50 cm tall (30 cm for the grade one students) that can hold 'The Book with No Pictures' for ten or more seconds. 

Do you have ideas for other challenges?

Making Bread

Today we made bread again but this time Ms. L. Let us do everything. We had to read the recipe and we did all the measuring.  Take a look..

Now we felt that we did everything correctly but three hours later our bread was still quite small.  It tasted good but it didn't look like how it did the last time.

Do you have any suggestions for us for next time?

We Made a 1000 Chart

Our grade three classmates have been working together to create a 1,000 chart. It is tough to take a picture of the entire thing because it is so big, but here is what it looks like. We are now using it to help us with our addition and subtraction to and from 1,000.

Have you ever made a 1000 chart?

The Peace Book by Todd Parr

On Thursday we had a discussion around Peace. We started our discussion by reading The Peace Book  by Todd Parr.  If you're not familiar with this wonderful book please check out the video below of Todd Parr reading the book.

Planting a Promise

This year we were invited to take part in a program called Planting a Promise which provided us with some daffodils to explore and plant.

First we did some wondering and came up with these wonders.

Created with Padlet

Then we took some time looking closely at some of our daffodil bulbs.  They looked kind of funny, but we learned about the different parts.

Next we opened one up and took a peek inside.

Then it was time to prepare the garden to plant.  We invited the Gr 4-7 SAIL class to join us as well. When we looked a bit closer to the area we wanted to plant we realized it needed a lot of TLC. We spent quite a few minutes trying to weed out the weeds and prepare the soil. We realized it would need more time.

We headed back into class and planted a few bulbs in pots in our classroom. We are curious if they will grow inside or if they will only grow outside.

The next week we got back to the garden, We continued to weed, and then we added more soil.

Finally, it was time to plant. With a lot of elbow grease, and patience as we took turns with the tools we had, we planted our daffodil bulbs. 

Now we wait, and watch and hopefully come spring we'll have some beautiful flowers to share with you.

Design Challenges

Today we were introduced to three design challenges. For each challenge we have a goal and some criteria to meet while achieving the goal.  Here are our first three challenges and some of us trying to solve them.

Have you had design challenges before?