Hello families,
Happy Father’s Day! What a beautiful day. I hope all of you have been able to spend time together and really appreciate family-time during this busy season!
Last week was a very busy but fun-filled week! We began the week with a trip to the Science Center! The highlights included seeing the live Great Horned Owl, the science show on space and gravity, the “grain elevator” climbing apparatus, and the house where students got to “shingle” and “lay bricks.” The Science Center is always a favourite place for field trips and I just love seeing the kids interact with the exhibits, ask questions, and make connections between material learned in school and their personal experiences. We then had a wonderful picnic lunch at Candy Cane Park and luckily the weather was just perfect! The kids were happy and exhausted when we arrived back at the school! Thank you SO much to the parent volunteers! Your help was much appreciated.
In health we have continued to work in small groups and act out scenarios that demonstrate stopping, thinking about all possible choices one can make in that scenario, and then choosing and acting on the BEST choice for that scenario. It has been fun yet very educational as we have had many good discussions for different situations students might face, such as witnessing bullying, playing too many video games, or running out onto the street to catch a ball.
In social studies we have wrapped up our treaty education unit with the importance and significance of the circle. We have learned so much about our First Peoples and have gained a real respect for their traditions and way of life, as well as our shared history. We are ALL Treaty People!
In literacy we had our “contraction surgery” activity! It was SO much fun. Students worked in pairs and were given two cards with two words on them. They had to decide how to cut the words so that, when put together, they could make the appropriate contraction. Bandaids were used in place of apostrophes and our surgeons did very well. The kids really enjoyed this hands-on activity! We also read three books by Judith Viorst: “Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day,” “Alexander, Who Is Not (Do You Hear Me? I Mean It!) Going to Move” and “Alexander, Who’s Trying His Best to Be the Best Boy Ever” with Ms. Perkins’ class. We learned about character traits and brainstormed some together. In the beginning we found Alexander to be whiney, stubborn, and makes poor choices. As we read more books and learned more about Alexander we found him to be hard-working and capable of making good choices! We also had deep discussions about how Alexander was always in trouble and often became frustrated and upset when he thought all these bad things happening to him were due to the actions of others. We realized that each of us has choices to make all the time and it is HOW we react and what CHOICES we make when faced with difficult situations that can truly have an affect on our day and on our emotions!
We used our new knowledge of character traits when creating our Father’s Day shirt-and-tie craft! The children had so much fun writing, drawing, and brainstorming personality traits for their dads. I hope you all enjoyed them as much as we did making them!
In arts ed. we learned two new dances as part of our dance unit: the “Hopscotch Polka” and the “Cupid Shuffle!” This week we will be learning a few more and during the last week we will have our final “Dance-a-thon” where we will show off all the new dances and skills we have learned. It should be a great time!
Finally, on Friday we welcomed special guest Mr. Henry to our class to kick-off our objects and materials unit. He described to us what it is like to be an engineer and how engineers work with many different types of materials all of the time (natural and man-made). We went on a scavenger hunt around the school and looked for the many different types of materials our school is made out of such as glass, brick, metal, wood, and concrete. It was a great time and we learned so much. We will be exploring these materials further this week.
This coming week there may be a furry, little guest making a visit to our classroom. I will be sending out an email about this with some more details!
Have a great rest of the day and have a wonderful week!
Ms. Holmes