What to do during the summer?

The summer is a time to recharge, spend time outside and to special family outings.  Parents ask what they can do with their child over the summer to help them prepare for the next year. 

Here are some ideas: 

1.  Have great discussions!  Use your extra time to have detailed conversations about topics of interest.  Ask you child their opinion and get them to explain their thinking.  

2. Go to the zoo or the science centre.  You can even bring a journal to sketch and write about the things you see. 

3. Build something or bake something.  Get your child involved in a project.  Teach them how to use some tools and build something like a birdhouse.  Make some cookies for a neighbour/friend and talk about how you measure and follow instructions. 

4. Observe nature.  Go on a bug hunt or look at all the different kinds of plants you can find when out at a park or camping. 

5.  Read!  Read to your child and have your child read to you.  Choose a chapter book that is too hard for your child to read independently and read it to them.  Stop lots and make predictions, connections and ask questions.  Also have your child practise reading books that are just right for them.  The library is a great place to visit in the summer. 

6.  Play board games.  Monopoly junior, Mille Bourne, Guess Who, Snakes and Ladders.  Games teach kids to take turns, strategize and to add and count.   

Great for long car rides.......

7.  Practice counting forwards and backwards by 2s, 5s, 10s.  Count by 2s starting at 1.  Count by tens with different starting points. ex. 4, 14, 24, 34, 54...

8.  Practice mental math strategies for numbers to 18  

Doubles

Doubles plus one

Make Ten facts (1+9, 2+8, 3+7, 4+6, 5+5...)

Adding 9 facts (9+6...give one to the 9 to make 10 to make 10+5=15)

9.  Play rhyming games

10. PLAY!!!!!!!

Building a Habitat

   
What do all living things need? Air. Water. Food. Shelter.

Students created a habitat for the bug they researched. They included all their animals' needs in its habitat. Today students will be bringing home their habitat and informational report. We have spent a lot of time researching in books and on ipads to find information. Some students included important text features of non-fiction books, like headings, text boxes, labelled diagrams, and a glossary.
Please take the time to celebrate all this hard work with your child!

Happy Summer Solstice!

Today we did NOT go outside to do some summer observations because of the rain.  Instead we used oil pastels and hot colours to create suns with different patterns and textures.  Children filled sections with:
-curvy, straight, horizontal, vertical and diagonal lines
-dots, dashes, circles
-zig-zags, spirals and more

Building a bug habitat

 

On Monday, June 24, we will be building bug habitats in room 2. Today we planned out our habitats and students brainstormed some things they can collect from home to help make their habitat.

Here is a list of some of the things students are looking for:
- tissue paper
- fake feathers
- paper towel roll or toilet paper roll
- pom poms
- pipe cleaners
- rocks
- pine cones
- fake little plastic trees
- cotton balls

Goodbye butterflies!

Today we said goodbye to our butterflies.  It was windy for our little friends, and some took several attempts, but they managed to fly away. 

Afterwards, we learned about Haiku poems and worked on writing about our butterflies in this form.  A Haiku is a form of Japanese Poetry consisting of three lines.  The first line has 5 syllables, the second has 7 syllables and the last line has 5 syllables. 

Examples: 

Butterflies flutter
Away and up and away
I will miss them lots         -Audrina


The caterpillar
Eats to be a chrysalis
Then a butterfly             -Cierra


Butterflies are fun
Flittering around the wind
Goodbye butterflies           -Anhad

On Friday, we will make some art to put them on. 

During Montessori word period, children worked on measuring centres.  They practiced using different standard and non-standard units of measure like snap blocks, popsicle sticks, lego bricks and centimetres. 

Me to We Fair

    

The Me to We Club students organized a fair for today. The objective of this fair was to raise money for the pillar we are supporting this year: Clean Water/Sanitation in developing countries. Students in room 2 brought in donations today and participated in some fun games!

  

We have butterflies!

  

All of our butterflies have come out of their chrysalis! We will be observing them today and tomorrow and releasing them on Wednesday!

Lobsters and Butterflies!

Today we learned more about atlantic Canada. We learned about their major industries and natural resources. We talked about the importance of foresty, coal mining, tourism, and lobster fishing to the people of the maritimes provinces. Students then had the opportunity to create their own lobster and lobster trap!


It was also an exciting day in our butterfly world! We arrived this morning and one butterfly had hatched. We then got to watch the second one come out of its chrysalis! I'm sure more will hatch this weekend!

 

Summer Slide...

Summer slide is a term we use to refer to students slipping on their reading abilities over the summer. Many students/families forget how important it is to practice the skills we've acquired. This is especially important for beginner readers.
Today we visited the public library and listened to a presentation about a summer reading program. Your child is bringing home information about this program and other programs the library offers. Please take some time to review these programs and talk about the importance of reading every day (even in the summer!).

Watercolour pencil crayons

Today we worked on our Father's Day cards with water colour pencil crayons.  We based our cards on the metaphor of a toolkit.  We talk about toolkits in health a lot. 

We defined a toolkit as a collection of tools we possess to help us fix things or solve problems. 

We often talk about the strategies in our toolkits to solve problems with our peers, or to solve math equations.   Today the class thought about all the wonderful things our fathers do for us and how amazing they are.  To do all these great things, we decided they must possess great traits and attributes.  Children talked about their fathers as being thoughtful, kind, funny, patient, caring, gentle, responsible, hard working and being good listeners.   These were the tools our father's have to do such a great job. 

The kids worked really hard with this new medium.  Children practiced creating dark perimeter lines and creating texture patterns inside.  Some children noted that next time, they would make their lines darker as they faded quite a bit when they added the water. 

Pollinators and measurement

Today we watched a video about pollinators then went to the community gardens to collect some first hand data on what kinds of pollinators there were. 

In our video we learned how many types of creatures help fertilize plants by transporting pollen (often accidentally) from the stamen of the plant to the pistil of a plant.  We used a chart to collect observations.  Children placed a tally mark on their chart every time they witnessed an creature crawling on these flower parts. 

Back at the class we totaled our tallies and wrote about our observations.  Most kids had the most tallies for bees.  Children saw some butterflies flying in the field but not visiting the flowers.  Kids found other insects pollinating on the flower parts like wasps, ants and beetles. 

This afternoon we explored measurement some more.  We looked at what made a good referent for measuring.  We determined that rocks were too varied and irregular to be good referents.  Good referents are uniform and identical in size and shape.  We also looked at some standard referents like centimeters, meters, pounds and ounces.  Look around your house for standard measurement units. 

Then the kids had fun measuring different objects in the class from their shoes to their water bottles.

Informational Reports

 . 

Today we started our final informational report. We are going to be working on our researching skills over the next 2 weeks. Students will be reading through books and using the iPads to gather information about a bug of their choice. Today we just started looking through books and creating our title page for our non-fiction book. We're talking about the different between information we gather from books versus information we thinking we know. These will be informational reports, so entirely true information. Talk to your child about their bug and what they think they know and how they're going to gather information to write in their report. Also if you have books at home that your child would like to use, they are more than welcome to bring them into the class.

Stop Motion Videos

Today with our buddies we created STOP MOTION videos.  Using a variety of materials like plastercine,  plastic toys, lego, pens and blocks they created characters to tell stories with.

It was fun- Parsa

We made a cool plastercine character and other people wanted to use it. -Alyssa

It really moved my brain....I liked it-  Audrina

My buddy and I made up a character.  -Anhad

I want to do it again-  Briauna

YAAAAAHHHHH!  About half (6 out of 10) of our caterpillars have made their Chrysalis.  The other four are hanging in a j shape, which means they will turn into a chrysalis soon!  Caterpillar #6 is wiggling and jiggling and is about half way finished building its Chrysalis.

Stampede Breakfast

TOMORROW! Bring your plate and cutlery and enjoy some pancakes and some YeeHaw, fun! 

7:30am - 9:30am

ELEV8 Lacrosse

  

Today we had the pleasure of learning from a lacrosse expert. We learned how to pick up a ball, some tricks and even played a game, called hungry, hungry hippos. Next week, we'll put some of these skills into place out on our field!

Measurement and more

It was exciting today to see how GIGANTIC our caterpillars are!  This had us think a little about how we describe size.  Usually we describe caterpillars as small creatures, they were just big in comparison to last week.  We have been working on using referents to help us describe size.  When we first got our caterpillars we decided they were as long as a pinky nail and as thick as a pipecleaner.  Today they were as long as a large paperclip or white eraser and were almost as thick as a pencil.   One was even attached to the top and make a j shape.  This is what they do right before forming their chrysalis.  We predict they will be in them by Friday.

During Montessori work period, some children begain comparing and order object labelling them with comparative words.  (Ex.  Weight:  heavier/lighter, width:  narrower/wider,   height:  taller/shorter). When done they are uploading an example to IRIS.

Lastly we read Judi Barnett's book:  Things that are the MOST.  Then we made our own pages for a class book.  We brainstormed adjectives (describing words):  spooky, cold, fast, soft, loud ...then thought of things that showed these descriptions.   The book is super silly, so we tried to be funny too.    If I choose loud,  I might think of something that is loud, doing something loud, while being somewhere loud.  For example,
The loudest thing in the world....... is an crow playing the drums at a construction site!