Terry Fox Run

We were doing the Terry Fox run!

(Today we did shared writing and spelling to write our blog post. SO much learning and teamwork!)

Xander: We were sweating.

Evelyn: We were running for a little bit.

Caleb: It was great!

Camilo: It was fun and cool.

Chance: I had fun and I ran fast.

Brodie: I ran like a cheetah.

J: We were running outside.

First Walk

Today we took advantage of the gorgeous fall weather and went for a big walk.

Along the way we noticed signs of fall. We also practiced walking safely, looking both ways, reading a map of our community and moving out of the way for other pedestrians and bikes.

Our walk led us to the Rod's Park where everyone ran around had a great time! We didn't take too many photos because we were busy having so much fun!

Reminder: Tomorrow is the Terry Fox Run. Please remember to bring your Toonies for Terry. 

Work on Writing

Today we introduced Work on Writing as another component of the Daily 5 literacy instruction.

We talked about why writing every day is important and what they should look and sound like in our classroom.

We also talked about what we should do when we don't know how to spell a word.

1) Stretch out the sounds.
2) Break the word up into chunks.
3) Look on the word wall (we decided we'll need to make one together).

Then we found perfect spots and started our writing. The first try we had a lot of trouble getting settled so we reviewed our jobs and tried again. The second time, we wrote for 9 minutes!!!!

Everyone doing their best writing!

Kids Post Number 1

Today the students of room 9 wrote and spelled all the words by themselves.


We played at recess.

We learned about buildings. 

We played in the gym.

Fall Celebrations

Yesterday the students of room 9 planned their own Fall celebration.

Here's what they planned:

Snack: Fruit kabobs in fall colours.

Art: The students chose, organized, and ran 3 centres.
1) leaf rubbing
2) pastel dragging
3) leaf painting

They also thought we should have fancy decorations so Mrs. Lowe brought napkins, centre pieces, and cups for the party.

These students were real leaders today!

Here is what the kids thought:

Xander - It was a great time.
Evelyn - It was awesome.
Autumn - I loved the food and the plates. They were awesome.
Isabella - It was fun and I liked the food.
Brodie - I really liked the centre piece and the painting of the leaves.
Camilo - I liked the food and I liked the centres where you could paint the leaves.
Landyn - It was cool and I liked the food.
Chance - I liked all of the centres.
Caleb - It was so cool.
Jaylene - I liked the painting.
Noah - I liked the food and the painting.
Rachel - The leaf rubbing and the food were good.
Justine - No one was being silly at the stations. 
Xydney - I really loved the stations and the food.
Charlotte - I liked being a leader.
Justin - It was fun going from station to station clockwise. 

Just Right Books

First, thanks to all of the families who came out to Math Night. The dinner was tasty and watching all of the families learn and play together was inspiring!

We will definitely be bringing some of the games into our classroom in the next few weeks.

Today we continued to practice Read to Self. Students are working on picking a good spot, reading the whole time, and building their stamina.

We also had a discussion about how to pick good books. First, I kinda tricked the kiddos by telling them all about my different pairs of shoes and how each one has a purpose and makes me excited to do that activity. Then I explained how I was actually teaching them about books and how when we pick them, we need to think about our purpose and if that book will make us excited to read it.

Ask students to tell you about all my shoes and their purposes :)

After students had a chance to read their books we did a sharing circle and each student had a chance to recommend a book to the class.

We're up to 16 minutes of independent reading!! Way to go room 9!

Manitoba Nature Summit 2016

This past weekend I had the amazing opportunity to attend the Manitoba Nature Summit. This is a weekend gathering that happens every other year and this was my first time attending.

On Friday morning I drove out to Camp Manitou to meet up with 4 teachers from Brooklands School and many other teachers, administrators, and Early Childhood educators from across Canada.

Our name tags for the weekend.

We all met with the purpose of learning how to better connect children with nature. The theme of the weekend was "Get Outside."

from the MB Nature Summit Instagram account

On Friday I attended two workshops. The first was Artistry of the Forest where we learned a brief history of nature art and then were given time to create our own art in the forest. The five of us St. James teachers worked together to create this piece.

We also walked around to see what everyone else created. It was so interesting to see how people had used different spaces and materials to create art that had a meaning and purpose.

My second workshop was on Risk as a Teacher. In this workshop we reflected on risky things we had done in our lives and how that made us feel, what the value was in those experiences, and we discussed the value in risk for our students. We also spent time talking about liability and how to mitigate as much risk as possible by creating solid plans, doing site visits, including experts in your planning, and having backup plans and procedures for when something does go wrong.

Jeff Reading

I really loved that the presenter made the workshop apply to people taking high school students or adult on weekend adventures, all the way to taking a group of kindergarten students to the park to collect leaves.

At the end of the day we got time to play! We rock climbed, sailed across a zip line, shot arrows at the archery range, and played lawn games.

On Saturday I attended a workshop on environmental games. I loved that all of the games were nature based and focused on cooperation and team building. I was way too busy playing to take any photos.

The last workshop of the weekend was on Planning with the Seasons. The presenter was a university friend of mine who is now the principal of Brant Argyle school. Sarah gave us lots of ideas for slowing down our practice and really focusing on the rhythm and feeling of the seasons. The work she does with her students is truly inspiring!

Thank you so much to The Manitoba Nature Summit for putting this on and to my students for being awesome while I was gone. Coming back from the weekend I felt exhausted and totally energized at the same time! Can't wait to try out all of my ideas!

Patterns Everywhere

Yesterday made all sorts of patterns with a variety of materials from our math lab.

Today we built on our understanding by "translating" shape patterns into action patterns. Then we translated those patterns into music!

Once the students practiced a few times they were ready to write, practice, and perform their very own songs!

We decided to take advantage of the beautiful weather and ended our day with a sharing circle outside.

We Want to be Readers!

Today we talked about becoming readers. This kids in our class are super smart and had lots of great ideas about why we should learn to read.

-to become authors
-for FUN!
-to get smart

Then we looked at the books in our library (there are thousands!). The students helped to organize the books into bins. As we were looking at the books we started to get excited about reading some of those books.

Our next step was shopping for books. Each student got their own book bag and chose 3 special books to put in their bag.

We Are All Special

Our Discovery Time designs and creations are getting more elaborate and detailed every day!

Today we also talked about how each of us are unique and special. We compared eye colour, hair colour, gender, and clothing. It was fun to see students observe themselves and others and then use their math skills to graph and compare the results!

Today we continued to explore our classroom environment and tools during Inquiry Time. 

At the end of the day we created self portraits to show how special we are. They aren't finished yet but we can't wait to show them off.