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.

Week 33: The Life of Butterflies

Books We Read
Houdini the Amazing Caterpillar
From Egg to Butterfly

Weekly Centres
Butterfly Books
After learning about the butterfly life cycle, we practiced writing our butterfly words and drew a picture of each stage of a butterfly's life.  Some of us used the word tracers, but most of us were willing and able to try the words freehand, even big words like "caterpillar" and "butterfly".

Dice Prediction
Using a similar table to the one we used in Sight Word Beyblade Arena, we predicted which number would show up most on a dice.  We recorded our prediction, then rolled the dice, and checked our prediction against what happened.  We then told Mr. McCullough what we thought would happen next time based on the rolls we did.

Camping
Our drama centre was turned into a campsite, where we built fires (Lincoln Logs & construction paper), caught fish, slept under the stars, and had all sorts of "outdoor" adventures.  There was even a tent!

Snap Cube Garden
Using snap cubes, we created flowers with green stems, and then had "blossoms" made of white, blue, yellow and red cube.  We then tried to join all of our flowers together to make a garden.

Other Things We Did
We did "Butterfly Yoga", starting off as an egg, turning into a caterpillar, standing up into our pupa, and then turning into a butterfly.

Our caterpillars continued to grow, and we saw how some of them had shed their skin again to grow even bigger!

Mr. McCullough brought us "Milk Fireworks", which involved filling a pie plate with milk and dropping food colouring into it.  Then, we added hand sanitzer, which caused the colours in to swirl into all sort of patterns.  We learned that milk and food colouring are both mostly made of water, and that alcohol (which is in sanitizer) can thin the water out, making it move.  We also learned that adding more water to water doesn't make it move, unless you do something like add hotter water or push the water along.

The Gardening Comittee recruited us to help clean-up the Kinder Garden area.  We took turns sweeping up wood chips and putting them back into the play areas.

We learned about solar power, using a solar powered butterfly, which would only fly around if there was sun.  We learned that, for solar power to work well, there can't be a lot of clouds, you should be outside, and that temperature doesn't really matter, only a clear sky.

We learned the difference between the "ar" and "er", creating words with the "ar" and learning that the "e" in "er" isn't pronounced!

We had a "Card Making" session on Friday for those who wanted to make Mother's Day cards.

Week 32: The Growing Mystery

Books We Read
Walter the Baker
Mister Seahorse
Does A Kangaroo Have a Mother, Too?
The Very Hungry Caterpillar

Weekly Centres
April Portfolio
Portfolio time again!  This month, we're trying to use 8 colours and to write as many words and letters as possible by ourselves, even if we're not quite sure how!

Mystery Rolls
With our mystery creature(s) coming to our class late this week, Mr. McCullough gave us a clue, telling us that the creatures would have a similar shape to toilet paper rolls.  Our job was to paint the toilet paper rolls green, white and black, which might help us figure out what kind of living thing is coming.

My Flower
After picking a seed to plant, we tried to make a version of our plantable flower (either sweet peas, chrysanthemums, sunflowers or hollyhock) out of pipe cleaner, markers and tissue paper.

Seed Sort
We learned that all of our seeds look a little different, and we had to sort them back into their individual containers based on appearance.

Other Things We Did
Monday was our Snickerdoodle Taste-Test!  We tried all four recipes, with some of them tasting really good, and others tasting a bit like "play-doh" (our words).  In the end, we chose the tastiest recipe, number 4, and decided that it wasn't really a snickerdoodle cookie, but more of a snickerdoodle crumble.  We also talked a bit about what ingredient we could add or take away to make our crumble more like a cookie.

Our Reading Buddies took us outside for the Jackman Community Clean-Up, which was postponed due to bad weather on Friday.  We helped clean up different parts of the yard, wearing rubber gloves, with Mr. McCullough, Ms. Stillman and our Reading Buddies making sure we were only picking up "safe" garbage and avoiding things like glass.

We received daily clues about what our Mystery Creature might be.  Our first clue was that it starts life as an egg.  The second clue was that, as a baby, it crawls on more than two legs.  Our third clue was that it sleeps for a long time before becoming an adult. We used these clues to make and change predictions and then, for Wednesday's Writer's Workshop, we drew pictures of the animal and wrote down our predictions.  On Friday, we learned that we would be getting butterflies!

Everybody got to plant their own flower seed from the selection above, and some people brought in their own seed to be planted as well!

Week 31: Earth Week

Books We Read
The Lorax

Song of the Week
The 3D-D-D
You put your sphere in, you take your sphere out,
You put your sphere in and you shake it all about!
You do the 3D-D-D and you go and seek one out
And that's what it's all about
(sphere is then replaced by cube, rectangular prism, cylinder, pyramid)

Weekly Centres
Build-A-Snickerdoodle
With the help of a few different parent volunteers, we created our own recipes for the Jackman Cookbook!  Mr. McCullough made sure we used ingredients that were as healthy as possible (brown sugar instead of white, whole wheat flour instead of white, and unsalted butter instead of salted) and we chose how much of each ingredient we were supposed to add to our mix!  We'll be having a "Taste Test" next week and the favourite version of the recipe will make the cookbook!

Planet Earth
Using round coffee filters and blue-and-green food colouring, we created our own version of Earth!

3D Frames
Our box of 3D shapes served as models as we tried to make toothpick and plastecine frames of pyramids, cubes and rectangular prisms.

Spring Word Book
Using the words worm, bud, flower, robin, rain, and sun, we created some picture books about spring.  We had the choice of using traceable letters to make the printing easier, or to use the word wall to spell the words on our paper freehand!

Other Things We Did
We talked about what "healthy eating" meant, and decided that it meant eating food that would help you grow strong, big, and not make you sick.  We then talked about how eating too much of anything can make you sick, what the right amount of unhealthy food is, and healthy alternatives for snacks and recipes.

Our school had our Earth Day assembly on Tuesday, and we were treated to songs, movies, plays and other performances.  We learned a lot about why taking care of the earth is important, and about some of the things we can do to help!

We asked if the worms and our new class flower could help each other, and we decided that they could because they could give the dirt some air for the plants and make the soil more healthy with compost.  So, we added some worms to our flower to see what would happen!

We learned about plurals, which means more than one.  You show something is a plural by adding an s to the end of it.  Some of us tried that in our Spring Books, where we wanted to draw more than one flower, worm, or even more than one sun!

Friday was the day we used all our recyclable material to create whatever we wanted!  There were a lot of boats, but also some a jewelry box, an alligator, the Easter bunny, and a hole that transformed into a cardboard box!  Thanks to all the parent volunteers who came and helped us make our creations real!

Week 30: We Won't Pass on Re-sort-clying

Books We Read
The Little Red Hen and the Passover Matzah
Bear Feels Sick
Have I Got A Book For You!
Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road?

Weekly Activities
Recycle Sort
After collecting recycling for a few weeks, it was time to do something with all of it!

First, we talked about what recycling is, why it's better to recycle something than to throw it in the ground.  We let Mr. McCullough know that it can make things look dirty, pollute the ground and even kill the polar bears!  He told us about recycling, and how machines can take a box apart and make a brand new box out of it, so we don't waste the paper in boxes.

After figuring out what things were made of, we sorted by four different rules - things made of carboard, metal, clear plastic and non-clear plastic.  Big plastic bags were hung up and we managed to fill up a garbage bag with enough cardboard to make it bigger than anybody in the class!  Even with all that cardboard, though, we were able to lift the bag.

Writing Workshop: Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road
Mr. McCullough read us Why Did The Chicken Cross The Road, which was illustrated by some of our favourite artists!  After listening to some of their reasons why the chicken crossed the road, we had to figure out why our chickens might have crossed the road.  We tried something new called "Writer's Workshop", where we put at least fifteen minutes into our drawing and writing, putting down whatever letters we could with no help from Mr. McCullough (aside from the occasional sound out).  It was hard work, but ended up being a lot of fun!

Easter Ovals and PassOvals
Our big craft this week involved working with an oval as a "base", and then adding to it with a variety of shapes, colours and textures with stickers, markers and paints.  Everybody made one oval for the classroom and most people made an extra oval (or a shape of their choice) to take home!

Other Things We Did

Our "Number Dance Party" continued, as we started working on our simple seven and our figure eight!

On Tuesday, when we had that crazy snowy day, we talked about how this kind of thing happens in spring once or twice, how spring isn't cancelled, it's not winter again, and how it would be warm again soon enough.  Then we all had a chance to draw what we thought the crazy weather looked like.

We checked in on our cele-trees, and some of them weren't doing too well!  We though that some more clear water might fix the red and green trees.  Unfortunately, it didn't, and we had to make a choice about whether we should feed the dead trees to the worms.  After some discussion, we decided it would be a bad idea because "if the food colouring made those trees sick, maybe they'll make the worms sick, and then they'd die."

An "Egg Hunt" happened on Friday, but it was a bit different from egg hunts you may have tried in the past.  Instead of searching for eggs that Mr. McCullough hid and keeping what we found, we hid eggs with our own names on them!  Our friends then had to find our eggs and, when they found one, they had to give it back to the person whose name was on it.  That person then had to hide the egg again, all while searching for other people's eggs.  In the end, everybody got to keep their own egg, which was really easy to find, since we all hid ours in the first place!

Week 29: Book Club, Bullying and Building

Books We Read
Pink
Oliver Button is a Sissy
My Princess Boy
And Tango Makes Three

Weekly Centres
Word Grid
Using our sight words as practice, we filled up a "word grid" with different words from our word wall.  It was definitely good printing practice for us!

Book Club Pages
Everybody picked a page from their favourite Book Club book and did their best to copy the picture and the words.  We then read the page to Mr. McCullough.

Magnificent Junkyard
Building on our Magnificent Tree creations from last week, we now started building 3D structures out of the recycled materials that have been brought into class.

Number Stories
Mr. McCullough introduced the idea of "Number Stories" on our message board, giving examples like "Four bees are flying to one flower" or "Three girls have long haircuts and two have short haircuts."  He used simple dot stickers to make his story clear, and then added details to the dots to make them into more interesting pictures.  We then tried this on our own at the math centre.  People were picking cats at the pet store, princesses were sharing a flower, and robins were learning lessons in tolerance!  Very interesting!

Other Things We Did
On Wednesday, we celebrated the International Day of Pink!  All week, we were reading books and talking about how it's okay to be yourself, even if yourself is a little bit different from what people think you should be, and how there really isn't such a thing as "boy things" and "girl things".  Almost everybody wore pink on Wednesday and those who didn't got to wear a Day of Pink sticker.

We found a lost ladybug in our stairway and decided we'd move it in to our worm home.  So far, so good!

We kept playing "That's Not A Number", focusing on the number 4, which we learned we can make with an upper-case L and a simple 1.  We also added number 6!

With Spring coming, Mr. McCullough planted some "trees" at the back of the class that looked a lot like celery.  We talked about what could make these trees grow stronger.  We decided water would help, but Mr. McCullough ran out of water and all we had left was red, blue and green food colouring!  We tried watering out "trees" (which looked a bit like celery) with food colouring and, by the end of the day, they had started to change colours.  By Friday, their leaves had completely changed!

We also planted some "trees" in our sandbox and water table, just to see which ones would grow or stay strong!

Week 28: Magnificent Spring

Books We Read

The Magnificent Tree

A Bird and his Worm

Diary of a Worm
Rainy Days with Bear

Song of the Week - Robin in the Rain

Robin in the rain, such a saucy fellow.
Robin in the rain, mind your socks of yellow.
Running in the garden with your nimble feet.
Digging for your dinner with your long, strong beak.
Robin in the rain, you don't mind the weather.
Showers always make your day!
Bet the worms were wishing you would stay at home!
Robin on a rainy day!

Weekly Centres

Spring Trees
Keeping with our theme of a tree for each season, we painted our spring trees this week!

Magnificent Trees
Using the book "The Magnificent Tree" as a guide, we used 2D shapes to create our own "Magnificent Trees" on the carpet, and 2D magnet shapes to create them on our magnet board.  We then told our friends what features the trees had!

5 Blocks

We kept practicing our math language of "plus" and "equals" by snapping together snap cubes of different colours, then counting and adding them together to make five.  We found out we could add 4 + 1, 3 + 2, and 5 + 0, and then reverse all of those numbers and get the same answer!

Writing To A Friend
Using Handwriting Without Tears style tracing sheets, we each took a paper with a classmate's name on it, wrote their name, and then drew a picture for them that we thought they'd like.  We then gave them their name and the picture!

Other Things We Did

After reading "The Magnificent Tree", we talked about why birds and animals would like natural trees over man-made structures, and why keeping things simple is sometimes the best.

We kept working with the number five, with our daily math question showing us how to properly use + and =.  

We discovered "new life" in our worm house, as some kind of plant had started to grow.  We're really excited to see what it might be!

For our spring trees, we made "mental pictures" in our head of what a spring tree might look like, then went outside to check that picture against real trees, and then came to a happy middle with our painted trees.


We kept playing "That's Not a Number", identifying the numbers 1, 2 and 3, figuring out which symbols were not numbers, and then practicing writing our numbers on our "Dance Tickets" so we could go to the class "Dance Party".

Our Friday Free Centre featured some extra painting, coloured chalk, iPads and a variety of building materials.  It was amazing seeing some of the neat things people came up with! 

Week 27: Worm Fiction

Books We Read

Worm Gets A Job

Life of an Earthworm
Ned's New House

Song of the Week

Think I'll Go Eat Worms

Nobody likes me, everybody hates me,
Guess I'll go eat worms,
Long, thin, slimy ones; Short, fat, juicy ones,
Itsy, bitsy, fuzzy wuzzy worms.
Down goes the first one, down goes the second one,
Oh how they wiggle and squirm.
Up comes the first one, up comes the second one,
Oh how they wiggle and squirm.

Weekly Centres
March Portfolio
Now working with a seven colour minimum, we kept adding to our portfolios, writing our words and using our sound out strategies.

Life of a Worm
Our art project for the week was creating "habitats" for worms, using pink pipe cleaners, paper scraps, mini pom-poms and glue.  We had to make sure our worm had a place to crawl through and that it had enough food.

Sight Word Beyblade
We added as, an, are, I and a to our sight word list and "did battle" with them in our Beyblade arena, charting which sight word we read the most.

? + ? = 5 and 5 = ? + ?
5 became the focus of our math this week, as we used rocks, coloured paper clips and bear counters to create math sentences, putting enough items in each circle to make five in total, and practicing using terms like "plus" and "equals".

Other Things We Did
We met our class worms, the red wrigglers!  We'll be keeping these worms in the class for a few weeks, feeding them vegetable scraps, before setting them loose in our garden once the weather improves.

We talked about finding good books to find facts, noting how Worm Gets A Job is a fiction book and probably not good for teaching us about how worms really live, while Life of an Earthworm is non-fiction and uses pictures, realistic drawings and key terms to teach us about worms.  We then decided what was realistic in Ned's New House (birds like to eat worms, worms eat fruit) and what was not realistic (worms having houses with doors, worms baking apple pies, worms getting dressed up like birds)

Math terms like "plus" and "equal" were introduced, as we tried to make 5 in as many different ways as we could.  It was a part of our daily math question and made its way into Mr. McCullough's Message.

"That's Not A Number" became a game we'd play in the class.  Mr. McCullough would write big numbers, letters and symbols on the board and we had to decide what was a number and what wasn't a number.  Then we practiced our number 5 and had a Number 5 Dance Party after!

"OI!"  We learned a new letter-combination sound!!!

For Earth Hour on Friday, we talked about where electricity comes from, why saving it is important, and how it can help the planet.  We then had Earth Hour, doing part of our centres and visiting the library in the dark!!!

Week 26: Spring is Coming

Books We Read
Where the Wild Things Are

Weekly Centres
Letter J
We're almost finished work on our capital letters!  "J" is the second-last letter we will learn!

Flower Blooms
With spring happening a bit later than usual this year, we thought we'd decorate the windowsill with our own spring blooms, made of coloured craft sticks, constuction paper, tissue paper, glue and dot stickers.

Book Club
Everybody in our class can read a little bit by themselves.  Now, we're working on reading together!  Mr. McCullough introduced us to a bunch of short books with easy patterns that help us learn to read.  He also taught us about using pictures and clues, along with the first few letters of a work we can't read, to help us decode new words.

March Break 5
After everybody talked about all the things they did on March Break, we discovered that we all did a lot of the same things, like watching movies, having special dinners, going someplace, playing with friends - so many different things.  So, we each picked five things we did on March Break and drew a small picture of each one.  We then explained our picture to Mr. McCullough

Other Things We Did
We talked about "luck" for St. Patrick's Day and what we should feel lucky for.  We talked about how we should feel lucky that we have nice things, family, friends, food, houses, toys, and all sorts of things that other people might not be lucky enough to have.

We discussed what a "symbol" was when we had to choose between the symbol of St. Patrick's Day and the symbol of Valentine's Day.  We figured out a symbol is a picture that means something without any words, like how a red octagon means "stop" - we didn't even need to see the words stop to know that!

It wasn't too painful when we learned the ou blend from our Jolly Jingles, a blend that let us read words like "out" and "ouch" and "about".

It was a March Break Show & Share week, as everybody brought in something from their March Break to talk about (although some people just brought what they wanted, which was okay, too.)

Week 25: Follow the Drinking Gourd to Break!

Books We Read
Abiyoyo
Aliens Love Underpants

This Week's Activities
The Letter I
We kept working on our top-middle letters, creating the letter "I".  We tried to make the "fancy" I, adding the two lines on the top and the bottom.

Make 5
As a special math challenge, everybody was asked to show us "five" one way or the other.  We had people using fingers, markers, books, colours, the actual number, and even names with five letters in it.

Drinking Gourd Maps
After rereading "Follow the Drinking Gourd" and practicing the song, we used the words and images to create our own maps, drawing pictures of dead trees, safe houses, rivers, hills and quails!

Other Things We Did

As soon as we heard the quail call, we went around the school on Friday afternoon, following the drinking gourd to safe houses, up hills, across rivers, past old forests, hiding from guards and dogs, all the way until we got to the safety of our classroom!  We looked for quilts to lead us to safe places and eventually made our way to the "freedom" of our classroom!  We also learned more about Harriet Tubman and how she helped slaves find their way to Canada!

Week 24: Riding the Underground Railroad

Books We Read
Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt
Follow the Drinking Gourd
Unspoken

Weekly Centres
February Portfolio
Mr. McCullough did a big lesson on what trying to spell looks like in kindergarten.  It cn luk lik this if it neds to, bcse it helps us lrn to spel.  Most of us tried to write all the words we could for our February Portfolio and we used our Sight Word Wall to help us!

Patchwork Quilts
After reading Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt, we created our own patches for a class quilt, using brown construction paper as a background and different coloured scraps of construction paper to make patterns.  It was the same way Clara made her map quilt, except that she was sewing.

Map Unscramble
We unscrambled a bunch of map pieces, putting them all back together in our group, making four maps of the Underground Railroad.

Building the Railroad
Using some of our action figures and blocks, we created hiding places for slaves looking to escape through the Underground Railroad.  We then role played what an escape might look like!

Other Things We Did
We talked about how Canada is a safe place for people of all colours and types and, how a few hundred years ago, people who were treated badly in America were able to escape to Canada so they could feel safer and have a better life.  Mr. McCullough taught us about the Underground Railroad, talked about how it's not right to own somebody who will do anything you want, and about how it's wrong to think you're better than somebody else because of the way they look.

Letter "A" became our letter of the week, and the first letter that had us starting in the top-middle!

We tried to figure out the story of Unspoken, a story with no words, and how it tied into the Underground Railroad.

Our messages this week had missing words that we had to either find on the Sight Word Board, or work on our sound out strategies.

We looked at our prediction of how many days there were in the school year.  Some people had predicted a million days of school, or a thousand, and we talked about whether we'd even get to 200, and what that might look like?

Week 23: Finding Family

Books We Read
Ribbit
Violet

Weekly Activities
Family Squares
We talked about different "generations" in a family and then drew "portraits" of our family, with one level being saved for the kids, one for the parents and adults their age, and another for grandparents and older adults.  It was fun listening to everybody talk about how their families looked.

Letter S
Our first Jolly Jingle became our printing letter of the week.  It really helped us to think of the S as a snake as we were drawing it.

Sight Word Search
After Mr. McCullough jumbled up our message, it was up to us to find it using Word Search Strategies!  We then used these strategies to help us do a Sight Word Search, where we had to find all 12 of our sight words!  Everybody found some, some people were able to get 9 on the first try, and some tried it on the second day and got all twelve!

Other Things We Did
Ms. Scott, the Pape Librarian, came in to tell us about all the neat things at the Pape library.  She read us a book, told us about library cards and how to take books out, and listened to some of our stories about the library!

The KinderOlympics were set up in the kindergarten playground, with events like curling, alpine skiing, hockey, skeleton and figure skating!

Using "Violet" as a base, we started talking about differences in people and how it's not okay to discriminate based on how people look.  This will be very important next week, as we start talking about Black History Month and the Underground Railroad!

We had to "Hush" to learn this week's Jolly Jingle, where we put the letters s and h together to create the sh sound.

Our Friday Centre Mashup resulted in some neat creations, like marble Beyblades, Plasticine treasure boxes, heart faces, rainbows and road maps!

Week 22: 100s of Valentines!

Books We Read
Chicka Chicka 1-2-3
Penguin in Love

Song of the Week
Valentine's Day
Valentine, Valentine, Valentine's Day.
The day that I'm sending a letter to say
I love you!
Yes, I do!
Hope you will send me a Valentine, too!

Made you a Valentine, made it today
For you are my friend and I wanted to say
I love you!
Yes, I do!
Hope you will send me a Valentine, too!

Here is the postman, a Valentine came,
All tied with a ribbon and signed with your name!
I love you!
Yes, I do!
Hope you will send me a Valentine, too!

Weekly Activities
100s Day Activities
We had two great activities today.  In the first one, Mr. McCullough gave us a sheet that was broken in to ten parts.  It was our job to fill each part with ten dots, circles, stickers, pictures, or anything we wanted, so long as there were ten of them.  After we had ten groups of ten, we were done!

Working with a partner, we filled a 100s chart with Fruit Loops!  Once it was full, we created necklaces or bracelets that we could take home and, if we wanted, eat!

Letter G
Chicka Chicka 1 2 3, this week we worked on the letter G!  Starting in the same spot as our C, O and Q, Mr. McCullough got us to stop when we were almost done, "breaking" the circle with a little line.

Valentine Bags
To get ready for Valentine's Day, we decorated some simple paper bags with stickers, foam hearts, glittery sticker hearts and markers.  These bags were very important for...

Valentine Hearts
Everybody made as many Valentine Hearts as they wanted, using the same materials as mentioned above, plus some shiny jewels.  One side of the card had the decorations, while the other had who the card was to and who is was from.

Other Things We Did
We learned that 10 groups of 10 makes a hundred, got up to 100 on our chart, and learned that, after 100, we start counting by 1s again!

Everybody brought in a bag of a hundred.... something!  We had puzzle pieces, pasta, beans, corn pops, Cheerios and even stickers!

Even though we read Chicka Chicka 1 2 3 earlier in the year, we read it again, because a good book is like a favourite food - you don't have to have it only once in your life!

X (as in x-ray) and CH (as in choo-choo) were added to our phonics list!  We also played a little bit of phonics roulette, randomly recalling phonics we've learned so far.

We talked about Valentine's Day, why love is important and what it actually means.

Week 21: Pictures, Puppets, Perseverance

Books We Read
I Will Surprise My Friend
Boo Hoo Bird
Old Black Fly

Special Activities
Matija's Goodbye Book
I was Matija's last day at Jackman on Monday, as he's now going to a different school.  We made him a "Going Away Present" in the form of a book.  Each page had a picture of us, our name written in big letters, and a space for us to draw a picture of a memory we had of Matija.

Letter Q
Since we did our Letter O last week, we made a whole new letter by adding a line, creating the letter Q.  We also learned that, to start most words with Q's, we have to add a "u" afterwards to create a "Qu" sound.

Zodiac Puppets
We found out that we were all oxen in the Chinese Zodiac, and talked a little bit about the Year of the Horse.  To celebrate, everybody got to create either an ox puppet or a horse puppet, creating it with foam, paper, googly eyes, pom poms, craft sticks, markers and stick-on jewels.

Letters to Shapes
We went back to our shape knowledge and turned some common numbers and capital letters into shapes by adding lines or by colouring in the spaces.

Other Things We Did
Reading Buddies became Math Buddies this week!  We went down to the library to work with the laptops and tried out IXL!  It was pretty fun and, when given the choice to keep going or read a book, most students stuck with IXL.

We had an assembly on the Olympics and talked about the idea of "Perseverance", which means trying really hard and never giving up, even if something is difficult.  We talked about times we've persevered in our life, both in school and out of school.

"Yummy Yellow Yogurt" helped us learn the "Y" sound!

February Calendar

Week 20: Gung Hei Fat Choi

Apologies for the shortened blog posts as of late.  A combination of time being spent on report cards and IEPs and some computer space shortage around the school.  The blog should be updated on a more frequent basis next week.

Books We Read
Log Hotel
Bringing In the New Year
The Very Quiet Cricket

Weekly Centres
January Portfolios
In exciting news, some of us were able to write words all by ourselves just by trying to write the sounds on the page!  For those who aren't there yet, Mr. McCullough wrote some of the words and then had us fill in blanks with our sight words!

Red Rabbit Lanterns
Using construction paper sheets and strips, along with markers and scissors, we created Red Rabbit Lanterns for our Lunar New Year Parade!

2D Shapes Buildings
We used our 2D magnet shapes and our building straws to create larger 2D shapes by combining smaller 2D shapes.

Zodiac Pointalism
Q-Tips, paint and pictures of animals from the Chinese Zodiac, we first decided what animal we were most like (not what animal we like most) and then used the Q-Tips to dot paint onto the pictures.

Other Things We Did
We adopted a Pine Seed Bug that we found crawling in our classroom.  We talked about what we could do to keep him happy, what kind of things we would need to put in his house, what kind of food he might eat, and why we shouldn't be scared of most bugs...

...unfortunately, our bug didn't last too long, so we had a talk about how tough it must be for a Pine Seed Bug to survive in a class where there weren't any pine seeds.  Everybody took the loss of the little guy pretty well, though.

We learned how to say "Happy New Year" in Chinese, and also talked about how we should always respect other languages, even if the sounds they have are a little different than the sounds we have.

Our Reading Buddies helped us with our first attempt at RAZ-Kids!  We were able to go online, read some books with them on the computer, and then try out the fun things in our RAZ-Rocket!   

On Friday, we had a "Lantern Parade" around the school, showing everybody our Red Rabbit lanterns while singing about Dragons, Horses and Lanterns!

Week 19: These Are The Shapes We Know!

Books We Read
Lin Yi's Lantern
Get Out Of Bed!

Song of the Week
These are the Shapes I Know
Sung to the tune of "These are the Daves I know"

These are the shapes I know, I know. These are the shapes I know.
Count the sides! Only one! It’s a circle, round and fun!
These are the shapes I know, I know. These are the shapes I know.
Count the sides! Only three! A triangle, so pointy!
These are the shapes I know, I know. These are the shapes I know.
Count the sides! Four the same! Square, square, that’s it’s name!
Count the sides! 2 short, two long! It’s a rectangle to end the song
These are the shapes I know, I know. These are the shapes I know.

Weekly Centres
Letter O
After working on Letter C on Monday, we tried our hand at the Letter O, remembering to complete the circle we started when we were making Cs.

Sandbox Shape Sort
The sandbox was filled with triangles, rectangles, squares and circles, and it was our job to figure out where they were and which containers to put them in to.

Snowflake Making
We continued using how to learn scissor, as Mr. McCullough gave us folded pieces of papers.  We cut traingles, rectangles, squares and circles into the, added some glitter, and then hung the snowflakes from our winter branch!

Sight Word Beyblade Battle
 A list of sight words was printed up and put into a container, and Mr. McCullough "let it rip" with one of the Beyblades in the class!  When the Beyblade landed on a word, we had to find it on our paper, making a simple graph.  We tracked each game to see which Beyblade one and, at the end, some of us tried doing it on our own!

Sounds of the Week
We worked on the difference between the "oo" in "book" and the "oo" in "too", and we also worked on our "V" sound in words like "vroom!"

Other Things We Did
We turned some of the letters in our message into shapes, changing an H into two squares and a rectangle, an L in to a triangle, and a C into a circle!

We talked more about the Lunar New Year and spent a little time discussing the difference between what we are like, and what we like.  This will be important when we do our Zodiac activity next week!

Week 18: For He Was Working Hard!

Books We Read
The Boy Who Ate The World
What Animals Really Like
The Great Race: The Story of the Chinese Zodiac

Weekly Centres
Letter Y
One of our two printing letters this week, Y was the first one where we had to start in the top corner but go diagonally.  We had to practice hard to not draw a "V with a tail", but eventually, we got it!

Tissue Paper Pictures
We used squares of tissue paper to create houses, horses, princesses, mermaids, and whatever else we could think of.  We then counted which squares we used the most, and which squares we used the least.

Medical Centre
Our drama centre was set up as a hospital this week, with people coming in with all kinds of "ailments", like flus and broken arms, in order to get fixed up.

Sight Word Magnets
FOR, WAS and HE were our sight words this week.  We lined up our magnets underneath and tried to sound out as many sight words as we could.  Some of us even practiced finding older sight words!

Other Things We Did
We talked some more about most, least and equal, using it to talk about our brand new sight words and many other things in the class.

Letter X was our full-class letter on Monday, and we got a chance to share our printing skills with our Reading Buddies.

We learned that, in China and other parts of the world, people follow a different calendar and celebrate the Lunar New Year.  We also learned about the legend of the Chinese Zodiac, why the cat and rat are still enemies, and we guessed what animals we might be!

Week 17: Welcome Back Kindies!

Books We Read
A is for Musk Ox
I Want My Hat Back
The After Christmas Tree

Song of the Week
Round the Village

Go round and round the village (repeat x3), as we have done before.
Go in and out the window (repeat x3), as we have done before.
Now come and face your partner (repeat x3), as we have done before.
Now follow me to London (repeat x3), as we have done before.
*Ask your child if they remember the dance

Weekly Centres
The Letter X
We started off the year with the letter "X", combining two big lines with one big letter.

Holiday Highlight
Everybody drew a picture of their Holiday Highlight, sharing one important, fun or interesting thing that happened over the holidays.  We heard about birthdays, presents, playing in the park and people without power!

Winter Tree
With a different colour palate, we "repeated" our autumn tree activity, this time making winter trees, looking through our nearby windows to see what differences we could see.

Most, Least & Equal Cubes
Mr. McCullough gave everybody a bag of cubes.  We had to figure out which colour we had the most of, which we had the least of, and which two colours we had equal amounts of.  Then, we coloured some squares that matched the words on a piece of paper so we could show what we know.

Other Things We Did
We had a big talk about all the fun things we did over our break!

We talked about how equal doesn't mean same.  Our daily math question helped with this, as Mr. McCullough would put up groups of shapes, asking us which groups were equal.  We learned that equal refers to the number that are the same, not if something is the same colour, or same shape, or same size... although sometimes it can!

Our Drama Centre has been redone as a Hospital, and we had lots of people acting out slip-and-fall injuries!

January Calendar