Students demonstrated such great sportsmanship and school spirit on Sports Day. I saw many students cheer for all teams. What a fun day!
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Category: Teamwork
RULER and the Importance of Emotions
The RULER program has become an integral part of our social and emotional learning. As we are always trying to find better ways to help our children solve conflicts, we hope that teaching these skills can help them to better understand and manage their emotions. This is what RULER stands for:
Since the beginning of the school year, we have been discussing feelings and emotion words. Students are learning how to label their emotions. As a class, we voted on the words that we felt were important to us. They were able to narrow them down to three words that they felt were most important to them.
Using these three words, we created our classroom charter. Our statement reads:
“We want to feel safe, peaceful, and included.”
Students also drew pictures about their feeling words. Here are three examples.
In conflict situations, I often relate back to our classroom charter. If someone forgets to clean up a mess on the floor, I would ask if this was a “safe” thing to do. Students would say that someone could slip on the mess, fall and hurt themselves.
By increasing our students’ social skills and emotional intelligence, we can build a classroom culture that encourages positive relationships. For more information on RULER, here is their website: http://ei.yale.edu/ruler/
We Can Measure
We have been learning how to measure linear objects. After measuring books, toys and other objects around the classroom, the students decided that they wanted to measure a student. They chose one larger unit and one smaller unit. Soon, they discovered that it took a lot longer to measure him using the smaller unit (e.g. the snappy cubes). Reflecting on the problem, many students decided it was best to use larger units to measure larger items. The student we measured is 61 snappy cubes long, or 8 markers long.
Valentine’s Day
This week, we celebrated Valentine’s Day! It was a wonderful opportunity to talk about kindness and generosity. Many students brought treats and cards to share.
Many students dressed up for Formal Day and got their photos taken. At lunch, there was a school-wide dance party!
The day before, we baked cookies! We rolled out the cookie dough and cut out shapes using cookie cutters – hearts, circles, ovals, and lips! And baked them in the oven.
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On Valentine’s Day, we decorated our cookies with icing and different coloured sprinkles.
In the afternoon, we had a hoot creating our owl treat bags!
These bags were full of treats by the end of the day.
Torch Relay Run
Last week, our school had a torch relay run to celebrate the opening of the 2018 Winter Olympics in Pyeongchang, South Korea. Each class chose a torch bearer who led us on a run around the field. Thanks to the leadership students for organizing the event.
Inquiry-Based Learning – Our Tree in October
Inquiry-based learning allows students to take ownership for their learning. My role is to guide them and encourage them to develop questions that will allow for further investigation. Students ask questions, give their ideas and opinions, and make observations about a topic they are interested in.
We are fortunate to have some beautiful trees on our school grounds. During discussions about the weather and seasonal changes, the students were intrigued and had many questions about the falling leaves and changing colours.
In October, we started our tree inquiry project. The students went outside and chose one of the trees in front of the school.
Let’s see what happens to our tree in December…
Jellyfish with our Big Buddies
Inspired by the origami jellyfish we saw at the Vancouver Aquarium, created by a local artist, we decided to create our own jellyfish. Thanks to our grade 4/5 big buddies from Mr. Boulanger’s class, as well as Ms. Mitchell, for helping us with this fun craft!
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The kindergarten students had many unique questions about jellyfish! We learned that jellyfish or jellies live in all the oceans. A jellyfish is an invertebrate made mostly of water. It has no heart, brain or bones. But it does have millions of stinging cells in their tentacles. When the tentacles capture food, toxin is injected into the prey. A jellyfish can sting you!
