Playing "Catch-up"!

I'm sorry that it has taken a while for me to return to sharing our learning with the parents through our blog.  Because of the revisioning meetings of last week and then the preparation for the sending home of the Evidence of Learning binders, classroom actions just haven't been recorded.

I thought you might like to see how the cross stitching with the Ukrainian Bilingual Creative Arts students went.  Once the little sampler was completed, I sewed it onto a felt mitten, which became the covers to our writing.  Grade Two students retold the folk tale, focusing on adding adjectives, and attempting to add conversation into a story properly.  There are SOOOO many rules to follow!  Grade Three students created their own original stories, using the basic premise of the Ukrainian folk tale.  They had to choose a setting, characters, a problem and then a solution!

We have been skipping in gym!  Spring must be right around the corner!  The students have been learning many 'tricks' and today they skipped with a partner.  Think of the co-ordination and co-operation that this takes!

In pairs, the students can work on skipping shoulder to shoulder OR face to face, or both partners facing in the same direction!  All are challenging!  I heard that the Easter Bunny might be bringing new skipping ropes in some of the baskets this year!

The new Grade Two science unit is called "Buoyancy and Boats."  The first experiment involved predicting which items would float and which would sink.  We had to agree on the definition of those words.  Once the predictions were complete, in small groups of 3, the students tried it out.  They were surprised to find out that an orange floated!  When attempting to explain why, many of the students used the typical thought that "heavy things sink."  In the next few experiments, we are going to dispel that thinking! (It is the same kind of incorrect thinking as we have winter because we are farther away from the sun....just not true!)  Ask questions and see if your little scientist can share their new learning with you.

Finally, for these last two weeks before Spring Break, we are looking at stories by Dr. Seuss.  We are learning about his life (and finding out that stories about real people are called biographies).  Today we tried to make up sentences using the 50 words that Dr. Seuss used to write the story "Green Eggs and Ham."  We have looked at "The Cat in the Hat" and made our own Thing 1 and Thing 2!  Thank you to all the families who shared their own books with us.  I was so impressed that one mommy sent in the book that she had had when she was a little girl!  The children are just "eating" these stories up!