February - a Busy Month!

I am not a tech. expert as you can tell!  Try as I might, these pictures will not upload any other way but sideways!  Hope you can still see that our own little groundhog here at our school DID see his shadow, which means we are to have six more weeks of winter!  Is he right?  We are tracking the weather to find out.

Sister Gertrude came to visit both Grade Two classes last Tuesday, which was Shrove Tuesday.  She helped us understand that when Father says "Do this in memory of me.." that the unleavened bread that he blesses becomes Jesus' Body and that the wine becomes Jesus' blood.  We see a miracle each and every time we go to mass.  

She helped us to understand that when we participate in the Adoration of the Eucharist, that we are seeing Jesus right here, right now. Our school will be having mass at 9:15 on Thursday Feb. 18th at which time Father will be placing Jesus in the Monstrance.  We will be going into the chapel for Adoration later that day.  ALL parents, grandparents and family members are invited to be part of this wonderful opportunity.  Please come if you are able.

Later on Tuesday, we were lucky enough to receive some pancakes and fruit as our morning snack.

Shrove Tuesday is sometimes called Fat Tuesday or Mardi Gras.  It is the day before Lent begins.

We were able to travel to our parish church and participate in Ash Wednesday celebration.  

The students in my class were so excited to see the red light that was on in the sanctuary, letting us know that Jesus was present in the tabernacle.  After mass, we all went into the area so that we could see the tabernacle and the light.  That worked well because they had heard all about these important symbols the day before from Sister.

Odd Todd and Even Steven

A HUGE thank you to Cara Carroll, a teacher blogger from Texas who shared with great idea to help children create a visual of what odd and even numbers are.  I loved her idea and created a version for my classroom too!

Here's the book that the names of the characters came from.  The story tells how Steven plants his garden in even numbers, while Todd adds an odd number of cactus to the garden.  What happens?  You can ask your child how it all turned out in the end.

The students have had a great deal of exposure to odd and even numbers this year, but they were more than a little stumped when they tried to identify larger two digit numbers as odd and even.  They could count to 12 and see that each one 'had a partner' so it was an even number, but how could they check if 71 was odd or even? Ask your math whiz how they can identify ANY number as odd or even?  What strategy are they using?  Does it always work?

One of our activities involved creating an Odd and Even Street.  All the even houses looked the same with two windows and the same coloured roofs and doors, The odd houses were different!  They were colourful, sat in different directions and sometimes there were 3 houses with the same number on them!  How odd!

The students worked very hard to complete their little research and opinion writing pieces.  They wrote the facts about groundhogs that they had learned by listening to stories, watching videos and reading a fact book first.  They then decided if, in their opinion, the Groundhog really could predict the weather, and wrote a minimum of four sentences about that opinion.  Some of the students were not quite finished today, so, given that they will be home for four days, they will be finishing their writing at home.  Please return this work to school on Monday. Thanks!

So cute!

A Dreary Day Might Mean....Spring is on its Way!

I love that our newest little boy from way across the seas asked me after the children had written in their agendas last week "What is groundhog?"  How can you explain this long standing tradition to someone who has never heard about it?  You can't!  He needed to see it to believe it!  Here's the whole gang  with our paper version of the groundhog....also known as a woodchuck (trivia!)

He set out in the snow.....

...but there was NO shadow!

Could it be true? Could Spring be on it's way?

The children are going to track the weather for the next few weeks to see how accurate our little weather rodent really is!

Tonight there is a new Weekly Reading Form (found somewhere on the internet...sorry, don't know where) that the children will be using.  It moves the children into metacognition, which is thinking about thinking.  They are to fill this form in for a full week, so the literacy bags will be the fifth book for the week.  Please assist this week as it is new to us all.  The form is due on Monday, but there will only be Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday on this week's form because of Teacher's Convention on Thursday and Friday.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Yesterday, we heard what would happen to our part of the world overnight.  We now know that the groundhog's prediction was true...we did have 6 more weeks of winter!  What we didn't know was that we actually are onto our 10th more week of winter!

Here's my vehicle before I left for school....can't even see what colour it is meant to be!

The front of the school at around 11:00 a.m.

A view of the school drop-off zone in the parent parking area!

BUT...I'll take the snow rather than tornadoes, any day!

Valentine's Greetings for the Groundhog Project Schools

This is a card for all of you that one of our classmates made.

Can you tell what we used to make the bunny?  It was our handprint!

Each of us got to make a card for someone in our family. Who would you make a card for?

We wanted to share one with you (because it is fun to write to you even when you are so far away!)

Introducing Ourselves to our Project Groundhog Friends

Here is a picture of our combined Grade 2 and 3 class.  There are 21 students total.  Not all the students can have their picture published on the blog, so the picture doesn't show everyone.

Here we are in front of our school.  It is over 35 years old.  It is named after a man who believed that everyone should go to school together.  We have lots of children who have special needs in our school.  Sometimes the children have wheelchairs, sometimes they have trouble seeing or hearing or sometimes it takes them longer to learn.  We follow God's rules and we see everyone as part of God's family.

You can see the forest near our school and we like to play there.  We have a playground behind the forest.

In our school we are learning about different 'Character'istics and right now we are studying what FAIRNESS is.  We already looked at CITIZENSHIP and CARING.  We practise being good citizens at school.

When you walk into our school this mural is on the left hand side.  It was painted by two artists from Ukraine with the help of some of the Jr. High students who are part of the Ukrainian Bilingual program in Gr. 7, 8 and 9.  We like all the bright colours!

This is our school 'purpose statement' that lets everyone who walks into our school know that everyday, the staff and students work towards the spiritual, personal and academic empowerment of each member of our school community.

Sherwood Park might be called a 'bedroom community' because it is only 3 kilometers from the capital city, Edmonton, of our province, Alberta.  The population is about 65,000 people.  We tried to find places that showed our Canadian heritage around our hamlet, such as the Canadian flag flying.

This is the letter box that you put mail into.

Here's one of the grocery stores.

                                    This is one of the places that you can buy gasoline for your car.

This store sells lots of things, not just tires!

This is where our parents LOVE to buy coffee and doughnuts!

This is the name of one of our banks.

This sign is just inside the bank's doors.

This is one store in the mall.  It was fun to see which places in our community show pride in being Canadian!

In our community, the RCMP are our police force.  Here is a little stuffie that is owned by one of the students.  The puppy is wearing a traditional outfit worn by the RCMP members at special occasions.

It is called the 'red serge'.

Do you know what the letters RCMP stand for?  That's a good question for you to search the answer to!

Project Groundhog

We are all "a twitter" with excitement.  Our class is paired up with 5 other classes in an internet  project which seeks the answer to the question "Can the groundhog predict the weather?"  Yesterday the class created a graph of their predictions of what would happen today.

The students are learning to make graphs and more importantly, to read graphs.  The data collected can be read this way:

a) More students in our class thought that the groundhog will see his shadow on Feb. 2nd.

b) Less students in our class thought that the groundhog will not see his shadow on Feb. 2nd.

c) Eleven students thought the groundhog will see his shadow and nine students thought the groundhog will not see his shadow.

d) There are two more students who thought the groundhog will see his shadow.

 The students were to do some homework last night.  Each was to think of a name for our groundhog.  After much discussion and a vote, this darling girl's choice of Shadow was agreed upon. We didn't know where to find a groundhog to dig out of his burrow, so I had to make one, but a paper groundhog doesn't eat much!

This is an amazingly mild winter here in central Alberta.  We can all agree that usually there is much more snow and much lower temperatures at this time of year.  None-the-less, our groundhog, Shadow, dutifully 'popped' into the snow and looked to see......

...an amazingly looooong shadow.  The students agreed that the shadow would not look this way later in the day.

Just to show how long the shadow really is, we had one of the Grade Three boys lay down beside the shadow and it was longer!  Who knew that even when you lay down, you can create a shadow!

When you put the whole class together, they created a monster shadow!  According to Shadow from Sherwood Park, we will have six more weeks of winter.  We are excited to hear from our 'partner' schools in Greenshore, North Carolina, Austinburg, Ohio, Lincoln, Nebraska, Urbandale, Indiana and Steinbach, Manitoba.  What do you think their groundhogs saw this morning?  Will they be expecting six more weeks of winter like our groundhog has told us that we will have?