Friendship and Feelings

This week we continued our discussion on friendship. The kids were introduced to Fin the Canucks' mascot! The Canucks for Kids Foundation has a wonderful character education program. 

This week Fin brought in different books that helped us talk about being a good team player, talking to a new friend and understanding how other people feel. 

Today we read "Hey Little Ant" by Phillip Hoose. This book is a conversation between two creatures a boy and an ant. One large and one small. The story asks us to look at the life from the insect's point of view. A boy converses with a tiny ant he wants to squish. Pleading, "You are very much like me," the ant explains he has a family and community too. 

After reading the story we talked about different emotions we feel. We discussed how everyone has emotions. Giving children the vocabulary to express the emotions they are feeling is an important life skill. We shared different things that make us feel these emotions. 

After the students choose what emotion they wanted to write about and they wrote about them on these cute robots.

A week of love

This week we embraced all things red and pink in the spirit of Valentine's Day. We read lots of books, talked about friendship, ways we can be a good friend and things we love. 

With a partner we played a roll and read game. We were practicing reading words with "or" and "ar" in them. 

One of our literacy centres this week was writing and creating Valentine cards. 

Here is a couple students practicing their reading and pointing to words with Mrs. Hickling during guided reading. 

We explored using celery as a stamp to create flower art. We love how they turned out!

We wrote about things we love. 

We brainstormed ways we could be a good friend and made these cute love bugs. 

We ended the week by making "Bee Mine" bags to hold our Valentine's. 

And had lots of fun delivering and spreading love and friendship! 

Happy Valentine's Day!

Literacy and Art Integration

This week we embraced winter and read lots of snowman stories and did many related activities. 

We read this story and did a writing and art activity about what we would do if we were a snowman who came alive at night. 

We created a snow lady word spinner. We practiced reading words that ended in "ow" and wrote sentences with these words. 

We painted our papier-mâché penguins!

We read a story called "Sneezy the Snowman." This is a fun story about a snowman who finds it way too cold outside and keeps doing things to melt. We sequenced the events of the story, wrote about how our snowman melted and "painted" our melted snowman with glue and shaving cream. 

Loved all of their ideas! 

We were also busy doing guided reading and literacy centres. This week the rotations included practicing our spelling words, using sight words in sentences, listening to reading and learning new reading strategies. 

Papier-mâché Workshop

Today we had local graphic artist And papier-mâché expert Shirley Hintz in to do part one of our papier-mâché projects!

We worked with a special formula of glue, toilet paper and water. We rolled, tapped and sculpted the shape of our penguins. 

The kids loved it and did an awesome job! Now we must wait 2 weeks for them to dry before we can paint! 

Measurement

This week we started a new unit in math- measurement. We have been measuring a wide range of things in our room! Our big buddies also helped us trace and cut out our bodies, next week we plan to use  them to explore a variety of ways to measure. 

 

Polar Express Day

Today was Polar Express day! We got to wear our pjs to school. The unexpected snowfall made the day even more magical. 

We started our day by reading my favourite Christmas story "The Polar Express."

They were quick to notice the snow begin to fall! 

Just like in the story we got to have hot chocolate today. We completed a writing and art activity about how to make hot cocoa. 

Before "boarding" the polar express students were given their tickets for the train and had them punched just like in the story. We got to watch the movie with Ms. Huddlestan's class. 

We have one more day of fun before winter break!