Our Class Week

Performing our doubles wrap for the grade 1 class

We skyped with another class today.  They did a rap about good fit books and we did a double's rap.  The class we skyped with was a grade 1 class.  We said "hi" and our principal from kindergarten is now their principal.  We asked them questions.  We had fun skyping.  They go for recess the same as us.  This is our second time skyping.






We had gym this week.  We played Yoshi island, treasure island and chicken pox.

We had our Remembrance Day assembly.  We heard a song about the soldiers and it was really sad.  Also we heard orff club.  We had poppies to put on our shirts too.  Some of the students in our school drew pictures about Remembrance Day.

We finished our monster and we have to take him down because he is too big to keep for the whole year.

By Ms. Nairn's Class

Our Last Day with our Monster

 

Our First Skype Ever

The day has finally arrived!!!!  Today marked the first time we Skyped with another class, and they were Mr. Ferguson's grade four class.  We enjoyed sharing details about our monster making journey and asking questions about where the other class lived.  Here is what the students had to say:


We skyped with another class today.  They were from New Hampshire, United States.  We got to see what they look like because we were video chatting.  We had fun.  We got to see their monster's head.  They see deer, moose, coyotes, foxes, black bears, mountain lions rabbits, chipmunks and porcupines in their back yards.  When they look out their school window they see mountains.  And they get to ski on the mountains.

Our classmates asking questions to Mr. Ferguson's Class

After we skyped we went for recess.  There was snow on the ground.  We played with the snow and some of us made snowmen.  Some of us made a giant snowball.  And some of us even made snow balls and Ms. Nairn took some pictures.

This picture slideshow created with Smilebox

This is what it looks like when we are writing our whole class blog posts like the one we wrote today.

The Monster

We have had a very eventful week:

Our monster is done and it is scary (you can see the picture) - Kylie
Our monster's  name is Puffle - Rory
The tail of our monster is long - Daniel
Building the monster was fun - Nick
It took a long time to make the monster - Kaydince
We had so much fun building the monster - A
We like our monster - Lily
We put alot of work into the monster - Keiran

We had baby Lauren and she layed on her back - Devan
We had fun with baby Lauren - Mimi

We had an assembly and we sang Halloween songs - Abi
We had a Halloween party - Morgan
We had Halloween gym - Maki

 

Our Monster

Enjoying our Halloween Party

The first half of our monster building

I am sure most of our students' families have by now heard something about the monster building project.  I discovered it this summer while exploring different ways to connect with other classrooms around the world.  There are 42 different classrooms participating and each class was tasked with selecting and describing one part of our monster.  I pre-chose the legs and together as a class we described them as:

3 legs, blue, green, gold, 3 feet long, 1.6 feet wide, squishy, scaley, stripes, and glittery

This means each of the 42 participating classrooms with have a monster with 3 legs.

Back in our class, pairs of students have been given a body part to work on and the description of what it should look like.  The pairs must then decided what materials to use and work together to make their part. (Special thanks to all the families who donated various materials to our project, we greatly appreciate it.)   

But the teamwork doesn't stop there.  Each group must also work with the a joining part's group to figure out how to attach the pieces together (for example, the foot group has to also work with the leg group and the toe group).

We hope to have a chance to skype or e-mail some of the other participants, or visit their blogs to see how they are constructing their monsters.

Below is a slide show of our class sorting the body parts to see which ones connected to which, and then us building them.  Also included are two videos of students explaining their plans.

Ms. Nairn

Create your own slideshow design

Our short week

It was a short week at school this week, but we got alot accomplished.  We did not get a chance to write a end of week post as a class because we have been working hard on our monster project and everyone is busy with their piece of the puzzle (I will write more on this later this weekend).   

We also had a visit by our community outreach police officer who talked with all the grade two and 1/2 classes about bulling.  I am seeing our students put in to practice the lessons she taught us about sticking up for each other and standing up for yourself.  Every day I see evidence of what a caring and empathetic classroom community everyone has helped create.

We can now do 20 minutes straight of writing and students are getting opportunities to share their hard work with the rest of the class.  It is a delight to see students taking such joy in their writing and I am seeing a lot of growth, our class has come along way in two short months.  As a teacher there is nothing better then seeing students get excited about something, especially writing.  One student this week came up to me after his guided reading session and said "Ms. Nairn, I hope I didn't miss writing".

I can see each child in our class gaining confidence, and getting excited about the new discoveries and connections they are making.  Keep up the great work Venus 1!!!

Ms. Nairn

Some of the students enjoying work on writing:

Our first step in our monster project was to get our creativity flowing by designing our own monsters on paper:

 

Today was crazy hair day and here are some of the fashionable hairdo's:

Coming Up Next....October

October will be an exciting month in our classroom:

- We will be participating in the Global Monster Project, along with 42 other classes around the world including classes from New Zealand, Russia and England.

- We will continue building stamina in daily 5 and add Word Work, Read to Someone, and Listen to Reading into our daily choices.

- We will continue to correspond with our University of Manitoba writing buddies

- Our whole school will be collecting money for UNICEF by participating in dress up days such as crazy hair day and sports day (stay tuned for fabulous photos)

- We will have new places to sit in our classroom.

- We will continue to study position and motion, with the end goal of creating our own cars.

- In math we will continue looking at patterns around us and learning new addition and subtraction strategies.

- We will get to meet baby Lauren

- We will continue blogging with our class buddies Mr. Hobley's grade 4 Hobloggers from Birmingham, Michigan and Room 14, our grade 1/2 bloggers from Richmond, New Zealand.


Ms. Nairn