This morning we continued to work on our Edward Tulane story maps in our Visual Journals. Students worked diligently to show the main parts of the story in a visual representation. During caroling this morning our classmate "London the Magnificent" entertained us with some amazing magic tricks. Each class had gym and daily 5.
In the afternoon we got to spend some time with the Kindergarten students to help them complete a special design challenge. The Kindergartens were challenged to create a trap that could catch an Elf. Our grade 3/4 students were excellent leaders and helped the Kindergartens create amazing traps. We enjoyed some fresh air and then finished up our Math garden project. We were also able to make a quick observation of our Bean seeds. Tomorrow is a full day of school and also the last day of school before the Winter Break. We will be encouraging students to take their indoor shoes home to be cleaned over the break.
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Just a very quick blog today!
Mr. Kelly began the day with a wonderful oral story telling of a Christmas memory from when he was a child. The students listened with rapt attention as the story unfolded! We then spent some time getting started our Edward Tulane Visual Journal pages. The fire crackled on the screen and we listened to the music playing softly as we concentrated on representing Edward's journey and his transformation throughout the novel. The students were challenging themselves to meet all of the criteria on our rubric which involved sequencing, adding appropriate imagery and labeling, representing the stars, and following directions. Mr Kelly and Mrs. Zwack were very impressed with the work ethic and with the results so far! After story and snack each of our classes participated in both PE and Music. The afternoon was spent finishing up both writing activities and our math garden project, followed by carol singing in the gym. Please remember to dress warmly for tomorrow!! M.H. bring your snow pants!! ; ) Ho Ho Ho!!! Excitement is in the air at Eric Harvie this week. Everyone seems to be ready for the holidays. This morning we worked on finishing up our Visual Journal pages about Needs and Wants. It took a lot of reminders to have everyone working and finishing their activity. We hope to finish that up tomorrow afternoon!
Next we had our read aloud of How to Catch and Elf in preparation for our visit to the Kindie class on Wednesday afternoon. We will be supporting in their classroom as the students design the perfect Elf Trap! We followed up our snack and story with caroling the gym as a whole school. This is a tradition now at Eric Harvie School where we come together to celebrate the season in song and fellowship. Mrs. Zwack remembers doing this as an elementary school student way back in the stone ages! Her favorite songs were Snoopy's Christmas and Six White Boomers. It was lovely to see all of our students enjoying the caroling today. We wrapped up the last bit of the morning with 20 minutes of PE for half the class and music of the other half. In the afternoon, we worked to complete our Wants and Needs page in our visual journals. We are almost done. This was followed by our plant inquiry in science. The choir students worked on a chart that the other students had completed last week. We used this chart to organize our observation and draw the changes our bean plants are going through. We have a lot of green thumbs in our room. The students were very surprised to see how much their bean plants had grown over the past few days. Reminders: Students are encouraged to wear an appropriate Christmas hat to sing carols in tomorrow. Oh boy, we are getting so close to our last day of school! Our students are very excited for their break and are enjoying the many festive activities at the school. We enjoyed our Kindergarten assembly today! Thank you to our youngest students for demonstrating your understanding of Peace and Kindness! This morning Mr. Kelly and Ms. Belliveau took our grade 4 students to TMC to participate in the Beakerhead challenge. This was a lovely opportunity to spend time at the middle school and to meet other grade 4 students from Tuscany who will also attend TMC next year. It was a fun morning and our students really enjoyed the challenge! The grade 3 students stayed at school with Mrs. Zwack this morning. We planned a surprise for our grade 4's when they returned. We had some fun setting up a winter scene using some decorations that Mrs. Zwack brought to share and some of our own art work! Everyone cooperated and worked together to create a beautiful scene. They were so excited to share what they had done with their peers. Today we said farewell to Ms. Belliveau who is leaving us for a few months and will be returning to complete her practicum this spring. We have enjoyed working with her and look forward to seeing her back soon.
We would also like to send a very warm thank you to all of you for supporting our Families Helping Families project! We have bagged up the generous donations and they have been delivered to the families who are most grateful. Question of the Day: This week we were zooming in on Kindness by looking for people who were doing things to show kindness toward others. Our Kindness bracelet campaign will continue next week. What are some of the kind things that you noticed this week? How did our classroom climate change? Have a lovely weekend!
This morning we continued the final stages of our Descriptive Writing with Miss Belliveau. We crafted together a set of paper drawers to compile our final pieces of writing. We will be finishing up this activity very soon.
In the afternoon before and after our music concert we continued our math garden activity. We are using this activity to become even better and faster at determining the area and perimeter of squares or rectangles. Question of the Day: How do you find the perimeter of your garden plots? Explain to your parents why The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane is a circle story. Our wonderful Wednesday started with a trip down memory lane! We had to re-tell the story of Edward Tulane and put all of the parts of his journey together in the correct order. We will use this to help us draw a map of Edward Tulane's journey in our visual journals later this week. Later in the morning we made some Christmas ornaments out of paper, these are being displayed on the doors of our Kindness hallway. Maybe we can show our families and friends which ones we made before our Christmas concert tomorrow evening. After creating our ornaments Mr. Kelly finished reading The Polar Express. This afternoon many of us had choir practice, the choir members met in the gym to practice for their big concert tomorrow. The rest of us were able to watch a cool science video about plants by Bill Nye the Science Guy! Later on, we prepared a visual journal page to make observations about the plant life cycle. Families Helping Families LAST DAY FOR FAMILIES HELPING FAMILIES. THANK YOU FOR YOUR GENEROSITY!
Grade 4's Friday Trip to TMC Grade 4 students have been invited to TMC for their Beackerhead challenge. It is a great chance to have the grade 4's visit the middle school. Mr. Kelly will be taking the grade 4's for the morning on Friday. We do now have enough volunteers to join us for the walk. Grade 4's please wear good walking shoes on Friday. Today we had a great Tuesday! We began reading a book that Mr. Kelly is really excited about! It's called The Polar Express, by author Chris Van Allsburg. It's a magical read and very fitting for this time of year. We continued our Descriptive Writing today with Miss Belliveau, we are working towards creating our final copy of Descriptive Writing organized with a set of drawers to display our sub-topics as separate and important elements for our topics. In math class we continued our Math Garden exercise. Today we framed our Math Gardens into colourful booklets to frame them, We will continue this activity throughout the week to complete our booklets. Also, Miss Belliveau would like all of the students to know that her grandfather was VERY impressed with the designs for our gardens when she called him to tell him about how they are coming along! Well done class! Families Helping Families ONLY 2 DAYS LEFT FOR FAMILIES HELPING FAMILIES. THANK YOU FOR YOUR GENEROSITY!
Grade 4's Friday Trip to TMC Grade 4 students have been invited to TMC for their Beackerhead challenge. It is a great chance to have the grade 4's visit the middle school. Mr. Kelly will be taking the grade 4's for the morning on Friday. We do now have enough volunteers to join us for the walk. Grade 4's please wear good walking shoes on Friday. Today we prepared our visual journals for our Needs and Wants collage. We all had gym & music. In math we continued to work on our garden plots. In science we discussed the needs of plants and started an experiment. We will see if we can sprout bean seeds before Winter Break.
Families Helping Familes ONLY 3 DAYS LEFT FOR FAMILIES HELPING FAMILIES. THANK YOU FOR YOUR GENEROSITY!
Choir Tomorrow Students in Choir - please meet outside the front doors before 8:25. We will do attendance outside the front of the school and begin the walk to TMC. Grade 4's Friday Trip to TMC Grade 4 students have been invited to TMC for their Beackerhead challenge. It is a great chance to have the grade 4's visit the middle school. Mrs. Kelly will be taking the grade 4's for the morning on Friday. We are looking for a few parent volunteers that come accompany us for the walk down to TMC. There is no need to stay with us, but we do need some support for the walk. Please email Mrs. Bates ([email protected]) if you are available to walk with the Grade 4s. Our wonderful Wednesday kicked off with a reading survey. We looked in our literacy bins and thought about the kinds of books we are reading for read to self -- are they a good fit book? What do we find most challenging about reading? What are we doing well at? What do we need help with? This was a very reflective exercise!
After that, we moved into thinking about needs and wants. How would you define needs? How would you define wants? Next week, we are going to make visual journal pages about needs and wants. Before phys.ed, we continued our conversation about the reading strategy "backup and reread." We read the book That Book Woman. It's a very interesting read, it uses words and language that begs to be reread! In math, our student teacher Miss Bell worked on math gardens with the class. We learned how to fill up all the space in our garden. Great work! In science, we are beginning to look at the function of plant parts. Using the plant samples we collected from the Coulee walk and materials around the classroom, we are telling stories about how plants grow. We are going to continue this first thing in the morning! Reminder: Due to Parent Teacher Conferences, tomorrow will be a Friday Schedule (we finish school at 12:05) If you have any spare magazines at home, please bring them in for our needs and wants visual journal pages! Also please visit our Families Helping Families sign up page to sign up for gifts for a family in need. We look forward to meeting with families at Parent Teacher Conferences Thursday and Friday. Lastly ... tomorrow is Miss Kurila's last day in the classroom! She will miss you all!!!! Today was a wonderful day in our classroom! We focused a lot on our reading and writing skills today in Daily 5, Book Club and with our Story time reading. Today we worked on asking questions to reflect on what we have read. Good readers will naturally begin to ask important questions about the plot as they are reading. Today we asked questions about our book 'Masterpiece', the following were excellent questions that we are hoping will be answered: Why is Mrs. Pomaday not kind to James? Will she change? - Jasper Why did they get a divorce? - Elizabeth We were also reminded by Miss Kurila that it is a great reading strategy to back up and re-read if you have lost track of what you are currently reading. We worked on these reading skills and more during our book club reading time today. Challenge of the day: Discuss with your family about the strategies we have introduced for reading today. Reminders: Parent/conferences are this week, please sign up for an appointment If anyone has old magazines they no longer need, we would love donations for our class for a project we will be completing Wednesday. FAMILIES HELPING FAMILIES ~ Continuing an Eric Harvie Tradition ~ We are happy to continue our Eric Harvie holiday tradition of Families Helping Families. This year our school has chosen to support families from Colonel J Fred Scott School. We are thrilled to have the opportunity to brighten each of these family’s holidays this year. This is also an amazing opportunity to further teach our children at Eric Harvie about compassion, kindness, citizenship, basic needs, family and friendship. We will also be supporting families in our EHS community who would benefit from a Christmas food hamper this season. You can donate in 2 ways: by contributing an item requested for the family sponsored by your child’s classroom and/or donating a grocery store gift card for an EHS family (we are asking for 40 donations of $25 each). IMPORTANT: all updates will be communicated through your child’s classroom blog. The link to sign up genius will be posted daily. All items already donated and items in need will be visible and kept up to date via sign up genius. Our families would love to not have to worry about the purchase of food items and more than one gift card to their chosen grocery store would be welcomed! ***ALL GIFTS MUST BE WRAPPED AND LABELLED INDICATING WHO THEY ARE FOR*** ALL GIFTS NEED TO BE AT SCHOOL BY: WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 13, 2017 Parents: We encourage you to involve your child in this process. Let them help wrap the gift, help with a general holiday card to indicate who the gift is going to. Read stories about compassion, kindness and giving. Talk to them about what the holidays look like around the world for families that may not have as much as we do here at Eric Harvie School! The more you involve them, the more they will learn! http://www.signupgenius.com/go/5080d44afab28abf94-kellyzwackbates http://www.signupgenius.com/go/5080d44afab28abf94-ehsfamilies The links above do work and have to be copied and pasted in a new browser |
AuthorMr. Kelly Archives
June 2018
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