Special Delivery!

It was just an ordinary Tuesday morning and I was in the middle of my guided reading lesson with a student. The others were doing exactly as they should-finishing up morning word work and reading independently. Suddenly, another staff member appeared at my door, Smart Board closely behind her.

“This is for you!” she said.

“For me? Are you sure?”

“Did no one tell you that you’re getting a Smart Board?”

“Umm, no!”

Apparently someone forgot to give me the memo, but who cares because Smart Boards are awesome! However, the tinge of OCD I have quickly kicked in and I spent the rest of the day pondering where I should put it. I knew I would have to completely rearrange my classroom in order to make this work. Luckily, I had an hour prep that afternoon and I spent it redesigning the place. When the kids came back from the other class they were at they were so excited. You would have thought Christmas came early by the sounds of them.

By getting rid of the laptop cart and placing the computer and LCD projector on the desk, I was able to place students’ desks behind it and they could still see.

Yay for groups!

 I also moved the rocking chair and “carpet area” to the back of the room where it’s much more spacious.

If you can recall, I had originally had them sitting in rows of 3 or 4 and they kept asking begging me to put them in groups, but it wouldn’t work because of the board and laptop cart. Now, everybody’s happy.

As for what we’ve been up to lately, academically, I thought I’d share with you our Science Board. We have finally finished up our unit on Light and Sound and this was up the whole time. It was an easy resource where I could post definitions and the kids learned quickly how to refer to it so they could include new vocabulary in their speaking and writing.

In literacy, we finished our read aloud of James and the Giant Peach (which they loved) and due to popular demand, we watched the movie on Thursday morning. And because I’m so creative and nice, I fed them peach slices and fuzzy peaches. Yum!

To go along with our read aloud, we were learning how to use elements of a story to write our own stories. We learned how to create mood, build tension, and use literary devices like similes and alliteration. All of these things came out beautifully in their stories.

Most of them had been exposed to The Writing Process before, and they enjoyed moving their names along as their stories progressed. If you’d like a copy of the story planner we used, click HERE.

When we arrived on Wednesday morning, there happened to be little power outage.

Needless to say, the kids were a tad chaotic, so I told them we were going to go to school like the pioneers (this is what I call coming up with a genius idea at the drop of a hat) and they loved it. What I loved is when the kids started discussing how we had to learn by natural light because our artificial light was unavailable. Look at them making connections to our science unit. Smarty pants.

CURRENTLY November

Looks like I missed the October CURRENTLY. That’s probably because October was a very busy month, but for once, I’m getting this done at the beginning of the month as opposed to mid-end of the month. Here goes…

Listening: We have an Apple TV so with the click of a button I can get my iTunes on my laptop to play through the TV. It sounds nice with the stereo system we have. I’m being kind of picky though and skipping through all the upbeat songs and sticking with the more calm ones. It’s Sunday night and I’m exhausted. I need something peaceful.

Loving: I love my family. I feel like I haven’t had quality time with them lately because everyone has been so busy. Last night the six of us went to an event and had a nice time sitting and chatting while enjoying some good music with longtime family friends.

Thinking: Hallelujah for the time change! Since the school year started, I feel like I’ve been on the verge of falling asleep on my drive to work each day. It’s so dark! Now it’s going to feel more like 8:00 when I leave which means I can enjoy the sunshine for the morning commute (which actually isn’t too long).

Wanting: Speaking of the time change, I’m exhausted. As I’ve told you before, I’m an old lady at heart and I keep myself on an early bedtime routine. I’m actually sleep.

Needing: Oddly enough, I feel like I need more time in my day to get everything done, despite the fact that we just gained an hour. To do all this, I will need more energy. I’ve done all I can do today so I’m hoping for more energy and progress this week.

Reading: I’m re-reading Sharp Objects by Gillian Flynn. A few years ago I read Gone Girl and LOVED it (I saw the movie opening night and loved that as well, just in case you were wondering). She’s one of those authors where even though I had only read one of her books, I knew I needed to read more; so right after I finished Gone Girl I went to the library and borrowed Sharp Objects. It was SO good that I went and bought my own copy the other day. I’ve been recommending it to people who have recently fallen in love with Gone Girl so I thought I’d give it another read so I could remember the details and talk about it excitedly.

Happy Halloween!

Some teachers really dislike Halloween because let’s face it-it’s a chaotic day where little to no instruction occurs. I happen to love Halloween. I think it’s a fun day where everyone can let loose and show off his/her creativity. If planned and managed correctly, it doesn’t have to be as chaotic and out of control as people may think.

Last year, my Grade One class won the Pumpkin Contest with our Mike Wazowski pumpkin. This year the Grade Threes and Fours wanted to make a minion and we created this masterpiece.

We didn’t win, but we had lots of fun making it, and received lots of compliments. Then I took him home and put him on my own front porch where the neighbourhood kids could admire it.

I’m a big fan of Halloween and all spirit days, and this week we had a lot of them. We had black and orange day (but I don’t actually own orange clothing so I had to get creative with my nails) and wacky hair day (no picture-just picture lots of pipe cleaners).

 (I know, I’m an artist)

And now for Halloween day. This year I dressed up as a cowgirl, which surprised all the kids because they were convinced I was going to dress up as a duck (which is actually a fantastic idea for next year).

I didn’t actually bring my cat to school, but this is how I greeted the kids at my own house. Zelda was a big hit!

Here’s the one thing I don't like about Halloween: the scary costumes. I know I sound like a baby, but there are some costumes that I really don’t like. The one I’m really talking about is the Scream guy. I saw that movie when I was 11 (when I was trying to like scary movies like all my friends) and I suffered from nightmares for years afterwards. So of course it was just my luck that one of my own students walked up to me in this costume. They all got a real kick out of legitimately scaring me. 

For our Halloween party, we watched Hotel Transylvania and ate cupcakes that I baked for them.

I think it was a great way to end the week; and may I just speak on behalf of all teachers when I say, thank goodness Halloween landed on a Friday!

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!