UNICEF for Haiti

Today we talked a lot about what a charitable organization is. We learned a lot about UNICEF and how they help children around the world.

We learned about Hurricane Matthew and how it has affected Haiti this month. Colonel J Fred Scott School has set a target of $500 to raise for UNICEF so that it can be used to send much needed supplies to those in need.

There is lots of information about the hurricane and how we can help on the UNICEF website:
http://www.unicef.ca/en/blog/surviving-hurricane-matthew

Our classroom has set a personal target to raise $50 for UNICEF to go toward our school target.

Orange and Black Day!

Monday is Orange and Black Day at school!

We will be celebrating Halloween by wearing Orange and Black this year. Please no costumes.

Happy Halloween Room 7 & 8!

Week 8

Week Eight was super fun! 

Wednesday was wild – see post Below!

Today we had our very first Roots of Empathy class. Monday we will be meeting our babies! We talked about what "Empathy" means, ask me what it means to me. We will be watching a baby grow this year and learning more about our emotions and our own growth. 

Mr. Southworth came in this week to help us start filming our informational recycling videos for science. We practiced and rehearsed our skits and then we got to film with tablets. Some groups used a green screen and others used other parts of the school and outside. We made a rubric for our film, ask me what I think is important in making a good film. 

In music we are using instruments! We are learning how to use the xylophones. We are learning how to add these instruments to our song for the assembly.

We have started to learn about catching and throwing in the gym. We have practiced football and bean bag bowling. Today in gym is Friday Fun Day and we played super hero dodge ball again. 

  

We started guided reading this week. We are doing this to improve our reading . Some people are doing novel studies and some students are reading in groups with a teacher. We are all working hard to move up our reading levels!

Until next week, Love, 

Room 7 & 8 

Wild Wednesday!

This Wednesday was Wild! We had so much fun getting messy with our learning!

In math we estimated how many seeds are in a pumpkin! We had 9 pumpkins in our classroom and we got to dig all of the seeds out and compare our estimates and our actual seed numbers. Before we cut into the pumpkins we had to draw the pumpkin that we picked and write out our estimates. Here are some pictures of our manic math adventures in pumpkin seed estimating:

    

  

Unfortunately, despite Miss Kolb and Miss Klem's best pumpkin diving efforts there were some rotten pumpkins. However this did not discourage anyone from getting elbows deep in pumpkin guts.

Miss Kolb picking out the best pumpkins for our class!

  

We had some fancy "designer" outfits for this activity, courtesy of Designer Miss Kolb. Luckily we had our two student teachers to help us for this wild activity.

  

 
We had to decide with our table group the best way to count all of the seeds. Some groups counted by 10s and some groups counted by 1s and some groups counted by 5.

   

At the end of the day we did a pumpkin draw and there were 9 lucky winners who got to take our pumpkins home.

At recess we got popcorn and it was delicious! 

We made recycled bottle art that was super cool! We used bottles and tissue paper to design our own original pieces. We made these bottles for our Remembrance Day Assembly. We will display the artwork we have done for the school to see. We wrote haikus about peace in our writing books and we are going to cover our bottles in our haikus. It was a very gluey and tissue papery mess and we had glue everywhere!

  

 

We even had a dance party on Wednesday because everyone was here! What a day! 

Week 7

As our Remembrance day assembly is quickly approaching we have been learning about peace in our classroom. This week we talked a lot about why peace is important and how we can be peaceful at school. We then wrote about what peace means to us and coloured on a small piece of paper with water colour pencil crayons. Next we put water on the pencil crayons and blended the colours to make beautiful pieces of art about what peace looks like to us.

Ms. Gunderson has been working with us on our Remembrance Day assembly. She is telling us about the peace assembly and we are singing a song called "May You Dwell in Peace."

Safety is really important to us at Colonel J Fred Scott School. We like to talk about safety and be prepared for emergencies. This week we had a fire drill AND a lock down practice, we did an excellent job on both. We are getting really good at not talking during emergency drills.

We did a math test this week on our number sense unit. We got bonus papers in math when we finished our tests to challenge us and practice our skills.

Speaking of assessment! The grade 3's continued to write their Student Learning Assessments (SLAs) this time they took the assessments on a computer.

Mr. Collins came back to the gym on Monday after being away for two weeks following the birth of his son Dominick, congratulations Mr. Collins! We know he will be a great parent to his now TWO kids and a great teacher to us because we saw his fantastic juggling skills in the gym this week. He is helping us become juggling masters. We have practiced with scarves, bean bags and balls. On Friday we had Friday FunDay!

We had a dance party because all of the students were here for the first time! Sadly, Miss Kolb was away sick that day and was sorry to have missed out on showing off her moves.

Friday's are always fun in room 7 & 8 because we get to do Free Writing and Free Choice! Its the cherry on top of a great week!

Until next week,

Love,

Room 7 & 8

Week SIX

We won the Golden Garbage Cans this week!! We kept our room so neat and tidy that Mr. Thelmo decided we were deserving of the Cans and Miss Kolb and Miss Klem couldn't be more thrilled! Good job room 7 & 8!

In math we continued to learn about expanded form. We learned a new way to show it. We also used bigger numbers, into the ten thousands place! We played a game called "Roll it!" where we got to use dice and roll out numbers that we had to expand afterwards. We got to work alone or with a partner or a teacher. It was an awesome way to get numbers to expand.

We had our last week of Sound Kreations with Keston this week. This week he rapped for us and even did 2 back flips and it was sooooooooo cool! Some of our parents came to watch our last day. They were brave enough to join us in dancing Bollywood at the end of our show case, they were great!

We talked a lot about peace this week. We are learning about what peace means to us and why it is important and we will be sharing this at our Remembrance Day Assembly in November. We have also been learning a beautiful song in music with Ms. Gunderson that we will also be performing.

We have been doing a great job with our classroom jobs and our school job which is collecting paper recycling from all of the classes around the school to ensure that all of this recycling goes in the right place.

In science this week we have been working very hard with our small groups to create and write a script about one of the recycling bins in our school.

Mr. Southworth was gracious enough to spend almost an entire afternoon with us teaching us about filming. He came in and taught us about filming because in the coming weeks we will be making our own movies about recycling. They will be so good thanks to the tips that Mr. Southworth shared with us. We learned about tucking our elbows into our sides so that we have a steady shot and to hold the camera with two hands. We were also told "DO NOT ZOOM, DO NOT ZOOM, DO NOT ZOOM!" Mr. Southworth was very clear about this (and also kind)! We also learned about "head space" and "lead space." While learning about filming perspective, Mr. Southworth turned Miss Kolb into "Kolbzilla" by filming her crushing a small math manipulative town from down below. This made her seem much bigger than she is and it was so funny!

 

Mr. Southworth sharing his expertise with us.

Excellent collaboration was happening among our groups during our filming lesson. 

(This is an optical illusion, she is not standing on a table....) A great example of a tight and steady frame! 

Practicing giving our subject "lead space" in a video. 

"Kolbzilla" an original film.

The grade 3's started their SLA exams this week. They did a Math test and a literacy test. While the grade 3's were working hard on their test the grade 4's got to practice their writing skills in their free writing books. They were given picture prompts of many interesting scenes from National Geographic and got to write creative pieces on them. Some of them were very funny and some were a little more on the serious side and very factual.

Ayub put on his thinking cap for his SLA this week. 

Our grade 4's being very flexible and sharing their writing with each other in the hallway while the grade 3's used the quiet classroom for their SLAs. 

In our school we have an advisory group. Every classroom has a representative that goes to a meeting once a month with Ms. Paull and Mr. Southworth. At these meetings the advisory group is learning about peace, and the difference between bullying and being rude. They are also going to be sharing their learning with us in room 7 & 8 so that we can build our problem solving strategies.  Our 2 advisory group members shared a video that is posted on our school blog called "The World is Ours" it is about practicing peace and we had a great discussion about not judging people by the way they look and we saw some ways to help others and spread kindness.

Until next week,

Love,

Room 7 & 8