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!)

If I lived in a snow globe....

Here's a book that I had never seen before!  What a wonderful story to really focus on the characters, setting, problem and solution.  There is a family that lives in a house, probably in the Victorian times, and on their mantle (great vocabulary discussion), is a snow globe which also houses a family!  The snow globe family is hoping for a blizzard.  How does the family get its wish?

We got to make our own little snow globes, each with a little snowman inside.

Each student then used their imagination to create a story about living in a snow globe.  Of course they could choose to be one of the characters in this story.  Their task was to describe the setting, and offer a solution to the problem that the characters faced!

Some of the stories went on for pages!

The students' drawings are becoming impressive with much more detail!

Only three more students to complete this display!

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!

Snowman Stories

I admit it!  I wish my boys were young enough that I could paint their fingers and have them make these adorable snowmen!  Given that boys in university and high school no longer indulge their mother, I am quite happy that my little darlings in the class were willing to allow their fingers to be painted!  I hope that you treasure these little canvases!

Besides being a wonderful keepsake, the snowmen became the main characters in the students' latest  story writing.

Each student painted the canvases, then pressed their white painted fingers onto the canvases, used our Sharpie pens to add the features and details and dipped the eraser of a pencil into paint to add the falling snowflakes!

With that inspiration, great stories were born!

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?

Layering Liquids

The Grade Two students are almost complete their "Exploring Liquids" unit in Science.  We are practising the scientific method/procedures as we do the experiments and trying to observe, hypothesize and talk like scientists.  This was a demonstration.  Five liquids were poured into the glass.  Do you see all of the liquids mixed together?  Why not?

Different liquids have different densities?  What does that mean?  Corn syrup is the liquid with the highest density and it sat at the bottom and would not mix with the other liquids that were poured on top of it.  Next came water that we mixed with food colouring. We then poured on cooking oil.  These three liquids sat on top of each other.  The fourth liquid was vinegar.  Because vinegar and water look almost the same, we were sure that we could see the fourth layer BUT, when we poured the vinegar on, it slipped below the oil and mixed with the water.  Can you tell why this happened?  Finally we added green dish washing liquid.  Again we thought it would form a fourth layer on top, but it slipped below the oil and the water/vinegar mixture and sat on top of the corn syrup.  Which liquid had the lightest density?  Why did the water and vinegar mix?  Why did the dish soap go below the water?  Scientists ask questions.  We do too!

Licensed to Write!

Traditionally, students in Grade Three are taught how to handwrite.  Since we are a combined Grade 2 and Grade 3 classroom, it makes sense that all the students will be taught this almost dying skill. To ensure that the students take this opportunity seriously, they had to 'apply' for their 'cursive writing permit.'  On the first page they had to print their uppercase and lowercase letters along with their name.

On the second page they copied a promise and then wrote a few sentences about why they deserve this permit.  Their ideas were precious.  This one says:

I am allways willing to thry new things.  And I am vary quite.  I relly whant to lrean how to handwrite.

How could I say 'no'?  Permit granted in January, 2012!

Now in order to take a lesson, each student has to produce their Cursive Learner's Permit and display it on their desk during the lesson!  If they are caught 'speeding' or producing 'sloppy work', their permit might get taken away!