It has been a great start to the year! Division 15 is already shaping into a caring community of friends and helpers!
One of the main themes of our year together is focusing on how we can make our school and neighborhood community better through kindness! I can't wait to see where our theme takes us! We have just completed a very busy September together! The students have been settling in to their new class, learning routines, forming friendships and developing independence. We will be embarking on some great learning adventures this year including getting our hands dirty in the garden.
One of the most exciting things this month has been the installation of the school’s new garden beds. I am a lover of all things that grow and was thrilled to get the kids outside planting. In our garden bed we planted corn salad, swiss chard, broccoli and rosemary. By the end of October we will have added garlic to our bed as well. Garlic is a crop you plant in the Fall and harvest in the Summer. Next time you are at the school, ask your child to show you our hard work! We are also growing in the classroom! We planted two types of lettuce already and will be planting parsley and mint soon. The goal is to be able to share a salad this December. Aside from the joy of digging in the dirt and watching plants grow, the kids will be learning about healthy eating, local food sources, plant life cycles, the water cycle and sources of light. It has been a wonderful month and I’m excited to see where the year takes us! You know it is going to be a great day when Mr. D visits! Mr. Phil Duchene brought 6 of his students from the University of Victoria and spent the afternoon leading us through a series of drama exercises. The students got to try their hand at mime and creating tableaus. It all came together at the end when Mr. D directed us all in a Chamber Theatre activity where each of us had a role to play! We had an extraordinary time thanks to Mr.D and his students!
This school year is truly developing into the year of planting! Our classroom garden is doing well. It gives us something new to notice and wonder about daily. The lettuce is growing tall and our beans rival that of Jack and the Beanstalk! Yesterday we were able to sneak outside to play in the dirt again! Luckily the rain stopped just in time and we were able to stay dry while planting our garlic. Garlic is a winter crop that is planted in the fall and harvested in the early summer. The kids have decided we will make garlic bread in June when the garlic is ready! Next time you are at the grocery store try and point out the garlic that is available and determine where it was grown. I am so excited that we got to connect with Shereen from Life Cycles today. She spent the afternoon educating us about how to save seeds and why it's important to do so. We were able to collect seeds from the tomatoes she grew in her own garden and we harvested seeds from radishes grown on our own playground! We also planted some Winter peas in the garden box by the office. We will be saving the seeds we collected today and, if all goes well, will be planting them in the Spring! The new school year is off to a great start! The grade one and two kids in Division 19 have settled in nicely and have been busy building a wonderful learning community together. I am pretty excited about the learning projects we will be embarking upon together! Not least of which is the indoor vegetable garden we are growing. While tending to my home vegetable garden this summer I was inspired to grow a garden in the classroom. With a little research and some help from the knowledgeable people at Mr. Fertilizer, I purchased some indoor grow lights and we are officially off and running!
Last week we planted two varieties of lettuce seeds, some parsley and some mint. Our goal is to share a salad in December then move on to growing peas, carrots and possibly tomatoes! Aside from the joy of digging in the dirt and watching plants grow, the kids will be learning about healthy eating, local food sources, plant life cycles, the water cycle, and sources of light. All of this hands-on learning takes time, equipment and money and that is why I want to say a big thank you to two amazing women who are helping to make this year-long project a reality. Karin and Inge have gone above and beyond to support this project financially - without their help none of this would have been possible! We have been looking forward to our school trip to Gyro Beach all month! It is a wonderful day to celebrate our school year and spend the day adventuring with friends on the beach. It was a great day for all of us!
This week I launched our current Math unit - Geometry! We will be exploring 2-D and 3-D shapes and learning about each shape's specific attributes. We started with 2-D shapes this week. After naming the shapes and learning about the shape features (number of sides and vertices etc.) we started to look for where shapes were in our classroom and on our playground.
Kids were paired up in twos and given an iPad for the purpose of taking pictures of shapes in our community.
After collecting the photos, the kids reviewed the pictures they had taken and then deleted anything they didn't think was a good example. The following day they used the app Book Creator and make books with the pictures they had taken.
April is poetry month so the students are diving into the world of poems. For the last few months we have focused on learning a new poem each week with the focus being on rhyming words and reading with expression. This month though we are starting to explore a variety of different poetry styles and to write our own poems. The kids are pretty excited about writing poetry as they now have permission to "break the rules" so to speak. By reading a variety of different poems the kids have started to see that the authors of poems use capital letters, punctuation and words in unusual ways. For our first writing experience we decided to write the poem as a class and use Summit Park as our theme. We started by reading the book Daniel Finds a Poem by Micha Archer. We were inspired by how the animals in the story managed to describe ordinary things with interesting words. With our creative thinking caps on, we went up to Summit Park for our monthly walk. We stopped and sat in the grass to brainstorm words that described our feelings about being in the park. I recorded and saved the words for later use. The next day we looked at the words we had collected and started to play around with them. The kids suggested ways to group and arrange the words until we had a final product everyone was happy with. A copy of the poem is below and you will see it has no capital letters or periods - a fact the kids loved! From there I printed a copy of the poem for each student to illustrate. In the coming weeks the kids will work with partners and on their own to create more poems. Learning to estimate is an important part of numeracy instruction. Kids learn to make comparisons in order to judge quantity which is a skill that is used when deciding if an answer or solution to a problem is plausible. We started by looking at sets of 10 items and sets of 100 items in order to be better able to visualize these reference quantities. We practiced estimating and discovered that a "good" estimate doesn't need to be perfect, rather, it needs to be close! We had fun with hands on activities where each student looked at a collection of items, made an estimation and then checked the estimation by counting the items. Now that we have an understanding of what it means to make an estimation, we will continue to practice this skill. Even, while out for a walk, I will challenge the students to estimate how many rocks are piled up, or how many birds are in a tree, prior to counting and confirming the estimation.
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Ms. Shawna WoodPassionate about teaching, learning, inclusion and kindness. Archives
August 2019
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