The way we embrace technology and other ways to learn

Ginger loved watching the students as they worked

within the classroom using various types of technology.

They were intrigued by OSMO, which is an interactive

device that can be set up with my iPAD.  The little red

part at the top 'knows' what the students put in front of it.

Here the student is making an amount that equals the amount on

the bubble on the screen so that the bubble pops and gives points

to the player.

Some of my iPADs have stories downloaded onto them, so that 

students can 'listen to reading'.

The SMARTBoard in the classroom is interactive, which means

that the students can answer questions and the board can

give them a positive sound when they are correct.  Very positive

reinforcement!

Not everything great is high tech!  Good fun is being had with

cookie sheets and magnetic alphabet letters as these kiddos

spell words.

Stretching words is still a new skill and here a little car

is the motivator.  The students 'drive' along the letters, saying the

sounds (see the digraph /sh/ we have recently learned?) and then...

they lift up the flap to see if their decoding skills helped them read 

the word correctly.

This activity is called 'Read Around the Room'.

There are are cards set up around the class, and the

students, armed with a pencil and clipboard, walk around,

find the card and then write....sometimes words, sometimes numbers...

it's just a way to get students up and moving.

They are still learning but it seems a whole lot more fun than

staying in a chair.  In this activity, they were looking for

important parts of the 'Gingerbread Man' story.

I think Ginger is very excited about making gingerbread houses

tomorrow with our Grade 3 buddies!

Great collaboration makes us learn

Remember how we learned that when a gingerbread cooky gets wet,

it will be soggy and break apart?

Our next challenge was to build a bridge over the river

so that the gingerbread could get across and not have to ride

on the fox's back.

The students had the choice to work on their own or with a partner.

What was so great to hear were the conversations that the partners

carried on with each other.

There was negotiations and explanations.

They tried out different ideas.

Some found it difficult because the materials that they were 

using were toothpicks and marshmallows.

Not the strongest materials but it was important to 

'think outside the box' on this challenge.

How can the obstacles be overcome?

Here's an example...the original design had the bridge sag in the

centre, so these two are adding supports to each marshmallow,

with the hope that the middle won't be sagging when they turn it over.

I feel I should be saying "We interrupt our scheduled show for this

important message!"

Really I just wanted you to see the lovely angels that the students made

with their handprints.

I think these two are stumped....which is great because that is

part of the process.....its not working, so how do I fix it?

Even though this didn't work, I pointed out to all the students that 

the two boys had used triangles (see the toothpicks crossed on the

left, and that the triangle is the strongest shape in construction.

The students got to share their design and then try to have the

gingerbread man (cooky) walk across the bridge.

They were very honest, sometimes starting with

"The bad news is...."

or with "I thought that ...."

Some students are chatty and some have to be coaxed to share.

In the end, though, I do believe that they learned a lot from this hands-

on approach to learning how things are built.

The students created glyphs...a representation of something

about themselves.

Each part of the gingerbread person showed aspects of the

student who was creating it:

bow tie colour was the month he or she was born

mouth was favourite pet

nose colour was age

eye colour was gender

leg stripes were number of sisters

arm stripes were number of brothers

buttons were favourite activities

Let's see if you can figure out if this is your child...

or is it this one

or maybe this one!

We took a poll and we now know that our elf's name is Ginger!

(Here she is watching the class when they sit on the rug)

The Gingerbread Man is helping us learn!

On Monday the kiddos got to add a couple of small coloured candies onto

a gingerbread man.  This little 'eating' activity served two purposes.

The students will be exploring their five senses in a future science unit,

so we did any activity with adding a word to how the cookie tasted, smelt, felt,

looked and sounded.

The second part was an activity that involved recording how the

cookie was eaten. (By the way, did you know that they proper

spelling is actually cooky?)

For the first bite, the students coloured the part of the gingerbread

man on the recording sheet red.  The second bite was recorded as

orange, the third bite was green and the fourth was blue.

Once the cooky was eaten, the whole class shared which part

they chomped on first.  The class completed a graph with this information.

In the end nine students ate a leg first, seven ate an arm first and

two bit into the head first!

On Monday afternoon we received a special delivery package from

SANTA!

Seems he had received the letter I had sent him earlier in the month

requesting a little elf to come and be with us for the last two weeks

before Christmas holidays.

Here she is!

This is where she was when we walked in this morning.

The gingerbread learning doesn't stop!

We wondered what would have happened if the gingerbread man

had just tried to swim across the river instead of getting onto

the fox's back.  The students wrote out their hypothesis, which is what 

scientists do.  The cookie was placed in a glass of water and once

we knew it had been in for a while, we made our observations.  That's

also what scientists do.  We noticed that the cooky got bigger,

soggy, changed colour, and when you tried to take it out of the water,

it fell apart and was really mushy.

Wait until you see what we do next!  Tune in tomorrow!