Week 40: Saying Goodbye!

Books We Read
This is Not My Hat
The Snail and the Whale
Oh, the Places You'll Go!

Song of the Week
Five Little Ducks

Five little ducks
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
"Quack, quack, quack, quack."
But only four little ducks came back.

Four little ducks
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
"Quack, quack, quack, quack."
But only three little ducks came back.

Three little ducks
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
"Quack, quack, quack, quack."
But only two little ducks came back.

Two little ducks
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
"Quack, quack, quack, quack."
But only one little duck came back.

One little duck
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
Mother duck said
"Quack, quack, quack, quack."
But none of the five little ducks came back.

Sad mother duck
Went out one day
Over the hill and far away
The sad mother duck said
"Quack, quack, quack."
And all of the five little ducks came back.

Things We Did

Jump Rope For Heart

We joined the whole school, practicing our jump rope skills for Jump Rope for Heart!  We tried jumping rope on our own, and then practiced the "snake" and "helicopter" games with Mr. McCullough using the rope!

Books in the Park

Our Reading Buddies, some parent volunteers, and the kids in the class all went to Withrow Park to read and have some fun!  After spending time reading, we had snack under a tree and watched the parents put on a show of "Five Little Ducks".  We then had some time to play in the playground area!

Jackman's Got Talent

We got to watch the Jackman's Got Talent show on Thursday afternoon!

Week 39: Proud of What We Know!

Weekly Activities
I'm Proud Of...
We talked about the word "PROUD" and defined it as "Being happy about something you did well or learned."  We decided we could be proud about things like reading, writing, learning math, scribbling with different colours instead of just one, climbing things in the playground, running faster than before, and a whole bunch of things.

Then, we got to look through our class work collection, remembering things we did all the way back in September up until now.  We picked things we were proudest of.  Everybody then picked the one thing they were most proud of doing or learning this year, and we wrote it on "Page 2" of our Report Cards, which will be going home next week.

Scientists in the Schools - Simply Marvelous Machines
Scientist Karin came into our class and taught us about all sorts of machines!  We learned about inclined planes by rolling different items; gears by making things like egg beaters move to mix soap; fulcrums by using teeter-totters and Little People toys; wedges by learning the rhyme "if it has an edge, it's a wedge!"; and wheels and axels by moving a bunch of different items in many different ways.  We learned machines are things that make our life easier, but they can be as complicated as a car or as simple as a zipper.

 June Portfolio
Our Portfolio is now finished!  We can see how we drew in every month, from September to June, and all the improvements that we've made!

Reading Buddy Commemorative Plates
Rather than write a "Thank You" card for our Reading Buddies, we decided we'd come up with something they could literally remember us by!  We used paper plates, glue, stickers, foam, tissue paper, markers, pastels, crayons and, most importantly, a black and white picture to create a Commemorative Plate!

Week 38: Show What We Know

Books We Read
Grandma, Grandpa and Me
Steam Train, Dream Train
Ladybug Girl

Song of the Week - Tingalayo 

Centres
What I know about math is...
Mr. McCullough put out paper, math manipulatives, numbers, markers, and a bunch of other equipment, allowing us to show anything important we knew about math.  Some people counted, others added, some people made patterns, and other people did a little bit of everything!

Summer Trees
The final tree in the "Tree Series" was painted, as we created summer trees with big, green canopies!

Mini-Canvas
Using paint, stamps, stickers, tissue paper and foam, we created mini-canvases with whatever design we liked!

Book Club Writing
Repeating a prior favourite, we picked a favourite page from a book club book, redrew the picture, and then wrote down the words on the page and read them back to Mr. McCullough.

Week 37: Self Parr-Traits!

Books We Read
It's Okay to Be Different
Otto's Birthday Party

Song - Flutterby Butterfly
Why did the Butterfly Flutterby?
Why did the Butterfly Flutterby?
Why did the Butterfly Flutterby?
'Cause he saw the dragonfly drink the flagon dry!
Flutterby butterfly flutterby.
Flutterby butterfly flutterby.
Drink that flagon dry, dragonfly!
Flutterby butterfly flutterby!

Other Things We Did
We finished off our large butterfly wings, having students search for matching, symmetrical print halves and then pasting them to our butterfly wings.

We discussed how Todd Parr makes portraits, and went about creating our own!

Step 1: After talking about what Todd's pictures look like (circle heads, simple hair, dots and lines for eyes and mouths, no noses), we drew our own with pencils on watercolour paper.

Step 2: We learned about outlining and outlined the pencil drawing with oil pastel.

Step 3: We used different colours of watercolour to paint the papers, creating the final stage of our Todd Parrtraits!

Week 36: Fly, Butterflies, Fly!

Weekly Centres
May Portfolios
We added another page to our portfolios, with everybody adding letters to try to write, and working hard on giving as many details as we could in our pictures.

Cocoon Painting
After creating our cocoons last week, we followed the colour scheme of our Painted Lady butterflies (green, grey, gold) and painted the papier mache!

Butterfly Wing Folds
Using a small, white piece of paper and black-and-orange paint, we painted one half of the paper with a black and orange design, then worked on our folding skills and created a symmetrical paint blot. We then matched our halves on two large, black pieces of poster paper to make butterfly wings.

Symmetrical Butterflies
A combination of foam butterflies and stickers were used to create symmetrical butterflies.

Other Things We Did
We learned about the concept of symmetry, the idea of two things matching on each side, except that they're reversed.

After taking a walk around the school, we selected the best place to release our butterflies!  We picked the Butterfly Garden in the main schoolyard because it was far away from birds, had some flowers, and there were plenty of trees and bushes for butterflies to hide in.  Then, we released the butterflies and watched them fly away!

Week 35: Counting Up to Count Down!

The short week has changed our format a bit, but here's what we're doing and what we did!

Books We Read
Hi, Fly Guy!
The Very Hungry Caterpillar (pop-up)
Jump, Frog, Jump!

Other Things We Did

We figured out that one of our caterpillars was okay and healthy, but just taking a long time to turn into a pupa, but we figured that the one, little, dried up, motionless caterpillar probably wasn't changing any time soon.

Some of our pupa began to hatch, and we adjusted our class tallies so we could keep track of how many butterflies we had!

We "fixed" our count and got caught up to date.  We figured out how many days there were left until the end of the school year, added a whole week's worth of days at one time, and tried to figure out how many days were in the school year overall based on the spaces left on the board.

After having made a caterpillar a few weeks ago, we moved to the next stage of metamorphosis!  We used papier mache and covered some long balloons to make them look like cocoons, which will be painted next week!

Our Writer's Workshop focused on the difference between living things and non-living things.  We decided that living things need to eat, drink, breathe, and most can move on their own, while non-living things can't do any of these things on their own.  Then, we drew pictures of living and non-living things and wrote about it!

Week 34: Metamorphosis, Stage 3

Books We Read
The Trouble with Tadpoles
Who Put a Frog in the Kitchen Sink

Song of the Week - Who Put a Frog in the Kitchen Sink

Weekly Centres
Flower Diagrams
After learning that roots were like "straws" that helped flowers drink up water, we labelled pictures of flowers, noting their petals, leaves, stems and roots.  We used straws and glue to create the root systems!

Plasticine Frog Life Cycles
We used green, white, black and blue Plasticine to create the full life cycle of a frog.

Frog Puzzles
Cooperatively, we built puzzles of frogs that showed the different stages of their life cycles.

Dice Bears
After learning how to roll and count dice last week, we played a game that involved rolling dice, counting the number, taking the right number of bear counters, and doing that until we emptied the bear container.  Some groups made shapes out of all the bears they used afterwards!

Other Things We Did
Officer John came in to talk to us about being safe on our way to and from school.  We learned lots of important things about wearing our helmets, what to do around cars, and how to cross the street.  Each of us then chose what we thought was the most important rule for our Writer's Workshop and drew a picture of it, writing the words from the rule that were on the Message Board underneath.

Our flowers have started to grow well in our greenhouse, so we made a choice about whether we should keep our flowers in the greenhouse or move them to a flower pot.  We also put our worms and their compost into the flower pot so that the flowers would have the best possible soil.  Some people wanted to keep their flowers in the greenhouse, some wanted to see how the soil would turn out.

We started keeping a "tally" of which of our caterpillars have turned into pupa, and which are still caterpillars.  We also talked about our smallest caterpillar, which isn't moving and looks a little dried up, and wondered if he'd make it to the pupa stage by Tuesday.