Birthdays and Books

After a delicious weekend of consuming way too much turkey, I returned to school and celebrated my big 25^th birthday with my class. I swear to you, they were more excited about my birthday than I was! Some of them even got me gifts and made me adorable cards. I truly have the most thoughtful students in the world.

 (The One Direction book was only for me to borrow. I had to give it back the next day, hahaha!)

The only downside to having different celebrations at school is that you are bound to have one or two kids that feel bad for not getting you anything. This is common at Christmas and at the end of the year. I was shocked enough that my birthday turned into such a big to do, so I hadn’t prepared myself for this issue. I always answer with this: “The best gift I could get is being with you on my birthday”. And it’s absolutely true. It’s something I say with a lot of truth behind it. It has been a long time since I’ve been at school on my actual birthday and I had a blast celebrating with 26 of my favourite people.

Moving on. Last time I wrote I said I’d share our new units; so here goes:

Math

We are starting a unit on patterning and we are using the context of a theme park. So far, we’ve been working with number pattern questions where we start at a number (76) and jump up by tens. We also started looking at a table of values and noticing patterns among the terms. Next week, we’ll kick it up a notch.

Literacy

We are starting a unit on-well many things, but there’s a big focus on mood. The read aloud I chose to use for this unit is James and the Giant Peach. As much as I love picture books, I was excited to start a novel. Looking back at last year, I read The BFG (same author) just as a transition activity and the kids loved it. It’s a great way to teach foreshadowing and inferring, which are two other biggies we’re trying to teach in this unit.

I want the students to understand the elements of a story, so the first day we looked at characters. We were first introduced to James, Aunt Spiker, and Aunt Sponge. The task was to draw a character and around the drawing, write down as many adjectives as you could think of to describe that character.

So now I need to tell you about Aunt Sponge. The book says she’s extremely fat; so fat, in fact that her shirt doesn’t even go all the way down and her belly sticks out. One of my threes decided to draw this character and this is what he drew:

Me: “Um, is that her bathing suit?”

Boy: “No, it’s her bra!”

Me: “Why did you draw that? I don’t remember that part in the book.”

Boy: “It says her shirt doesn’t go all the way down.”

I definitely had a good laugh. I hope you did too :) 

Turkeys, Scribbles, and Sound

We’ve been pretty artsy these past few weeks in Grades 3 & 4. Long ago (like, really long ago; a throwback to second year university, in fact) I bought a book called Scribbleville and I packed it away and totally forgot about it. But then I stumbled across it at the beginning of the school year and saved it for a line art lesson.

The book does double duty: it’s about people who live in Scribbleville where everything is made of scribbles. Then a stick man moves in and the citizens of Scribbleville need to learn how to accept people with differences. That triggered a great conversation. Then we made our own scribble art.

Then it was time to dive into our Thanksgiving Day art. We read the story Turkey Trouble. It’s about a turkey who is desperate to find a good disguise so that the farmer won’t find him and eat him for Thanksgiving dinner.

It was our job to take our own little turkeys and create a good disguise. Some of them were hilarious and very creative!

Santa Turkey

Queen Elsa Turkey

Georgina Blaze Hockey Turkey

Magician Turkey

Traditions and celebrations are part of the Grade 2 curriculum but I still think it’s very important to talk about and teach other celebrations that occur at this time of year. I have one little girl who celebrates Eid so I basically let her be the expert and tell the class what her family does for that holiday. We then traced our hands and arms and decorated them with our own henna designs. It was a hit. And then my sweet girl brought me in some left over food from her Eid celebration so I could try it.

Science

For those who teach split grades, it can be challenging to teach subjects like science because unlike language and math where the expectations are very similar, the units themselves can be very different. Not always; sometimes they go hand in hand quite nicely. This year, I’m only assigned to teaching my Grade 4 science because another teacher teaches my Grade 3 science while I’m on prep. So my Grade Threes receive the content as I teach Grade 4 science, but I just don’t assess them or evaluate them on what I’m teaching. Shhh, don’t tell them, though ;)

We started our Grade 4 unit on Light and Sound. This first week was spent specifically on learning the properties of sound.  We have learned that sound is caused by travelling vibrations and we did some fun experiments and games (Broken Telephone was a fun warm up; putting our ears on the fence posts and soccer nets and hearing how the sound travels through metal; and creating echoes with cardboard tubes and a metal cookie sheet)

And of course, no science unit would be complete without a little help from Bill Nye the Science Guy.

My SSC (student support centre) kids join us for science and I need to be mindful to teach to their needs and most of them respond well to watching videos, so Bill Nye was a hit with them.

The Ontario curriculum also puts a big focus on societal impacts so we talked about the wind turbine farms and how they have had mixed reactions. Although they are good for the environment because they provide clean energy, some people think they are awfully noisy. This debate sparked a great discussion in our classroom.

 Sneak Peek

I spent a lot of time this past week planning with my grade partners for our new math and language units. I can’t tell you what they’re about right now, but I can tell you that I’m extremely excited about them. We’ll be kick starting both of those on Tuesday and then I can fill you in.

Well, that’s it from me…for now. I need to go get ready for Thanksgiving dinner 2/3. I may just have to wear stretchy, comfy clothes when I go back to school on Tuesday…

Happy Thanksgiving!