Light Sources Animotos

In Science, we have been learning about light sources.  There are two categories of light sources: natural light and artificial light.  Natural light is light that comes from nature, for example, the sun.  Artificial light is made by humans, for example, a lamp.  To demonstrate their understanding of light sources, students created slideshows using a great program called Animoto.  Here are some photos of the students hard at work on the laptops putting together their slideshows.

 

 

 Here are a couple of examples of the finished Animotos.  To see all of the students' slideshows, please click here to visit students individual blogs where the slideshows are posted.

T'was the Night Before Christmas

Oops, it's a bit late. :-( Nonetheless, I wanted to show off the students' wonderful recitation of the poem, "T'was the Night Before Christmas". Each week we have a "Poem of the Week". In pairs, students usually practice reciting the whole poem to build fluency. However, since this is such a long poem, we divided it into sections, as you'll hear. First, here are a few photos of the students practicing their parts.

Now, click on the link, to hear the poem.  listen to ‘T'was the Night Before Christmas’ on Audioboo

Eggshell Ornaments

On Friday, we had a special guest in our classroom, retired teacher, Mrs. Schaefer.  Mrs. Schaefer used to teach at our school and she now volunteers several days a week, tutoring students and teaching her passion, art.  We are so lucky to have her!  On this visit, she came to teach us how to make eggshell ornaments.

Before we got started, Mrs. Schaefer showed us all the steps that we would do.

First, we needed to paint the eggs and apply glitter to the outside to make them sparkle.

Then, it was time to add glitter glue to the inside of the hollowed-out egg to make it shiny on the inside too.

Next, we put cotton inside the egg to look like snow, and chose a figurine to go rest on the cotton.

With the inside complete, it was time to visit one of our great parent volunteers who used the glue gun to put our choice of ribbon and beads around the opening of the egg.

After that, we headed over to another one of our wonderful helpers to choose our wire colour and attach it to the top of the egg so that the ornament can hang.

 Finally, we packed up our delicate creations so that they would survive the trip home.

Here are some of our finished ornaments.  They turned out beautifully, each one unique!

A huge thank you to Mrs. Schaefer and our parent volunteers for helping us create such wonderful ornaments!

Candy Trees

On Thursday, we did a special activity with our Kindergarten buddies to celebrate the holidays.  We made candy trees!  We used an upside down ice cream cone to form the tree, then covered it in green icing.  The icing was crucial because it acted as the glue for the most important part - the candy!  Here are some photos of our delicious creations.  (There are not any photos of our buddies because they have not signed blog permission notices).

What is your favourite holiday treat?

Organizing the Food Drive

Our class is in charge of a very important project at our school this month - organizing the annual holiday food drive in support of the Surrey Food Bank.  Did you know that over 15 000 people a month are helped by the Food Bank, and that 42% of those people are children and babies?  When we heard these statistics, we knew that it was very important to do something to help.  We spent all of last week in committees organizing various aspects of the food drive.

Creating a graph to keep track of  the food we collect.

Assigning which students will collect from which classes.

Writing announcements to read over the  P.A.

More announcers.

Creating a bulletin board display.

Folding and taping the boxes  for food collection.

Delivering the boxes (that's using your head!)

Writing a notice to go home with all students in the school.

Designing posters.

The food drive officially kicks of tomorrow, December 10, and runs until December 20.  Our goal is to collect 1 000 cans of food.  I know we can do it!