Ms. Mah- Div. 9

When we learned about the heartbreaking discovery of the remains of the 215 indigenous children found at the former Tk’emlups Indian Residential School, we wanted a way to honour the children who were not given the chance to share their gifts with the world. Our bulletin board is decorated with coloured feathers drawn by artist Michelle Stoney and as a community we each tied a ribbon to the fence to honour the lost children.

Hello Families,

I had posted on Friday, but due to technical difficulties, the emails to let you know bounced.

Please see our last post and here is a picture of our cute shape bears that we did this morning.

We have started to study bears!

We have adopted a bear, who we have named Fin, from the Grizzly Bear Foundation. He/she is roaming around Northern BC with 93 other bears out in the wild. We have been looking at the bear life cycle and how it is similar and different from human and bee life cycles.

Here is our Hibernating Bear directed drawing:

We have also been learning about coins and have started to earn and spend Mah Moola!

We get moola by listening in class, doing our jobs, and keeping our desks clean.  We are working toward getting a movie and popcorn. Each week we will put $10 on Mondays and $5 on Fridays into our cups to save money as a class.

Spring is in the air, so we made some beautiful Spring art to have it inside our school as well!

Thursday was Earth Day so we worked on Earth day promises. We brainstormed about ways we could help our Earth. Some things we thought of were:

-Not littering

-Only taking what we need

-Conserving (not wasting) water

-Reusing items

-Helping Bees

We have been busy studying Bees and since we get to use the laptops every other Friday we did some bee research. We went onto kiddle.co ( a kid friendly search engine), watched some bee videos, and  wrote some notes in our best kid spelling.

This week we started earning money! We will earn money for doing our jobs, being on task, keeping our desks clean, going above and beyond, and being kind. Next week we will learn about fines (for running /unsafe actions in school, not being on task etc.) Ms. Chatt’s class is also earning money (and fines). Through these experiences we will be learning about saving, spending, and working to earn money. I expect to see some rich students in the upcoming weeks!

Earth Week wouldn’t have been complete if we didn’t go outside to enjoy the sun as we worked.

Last week we made been  houses and planted marigolds.  This week they our plants have started to sprout! We are measuring them to see how tall they grow.

Today we made stools! We persevered and did such a great job! We will be using our stools inside and outside. Mr. Smith, our ELL teacher, came to give us a bit of a helping hand. It was wonderful to see students helping each other and showing how handy they all were. Everyone did an amazing job!

We are excited to be back! Our collaborative Thank you X  art is finally up on the board and looking amazing!

Since we will be learning about lifecycles this term we’ve welcomed some new pets into our classroom. Meet Sticky (named by the students) and her 3 babies (I only took pictures of 2 because the third one is really good at hiding!).

The students will be taking turns spraying the blackberry leaves/cage so that the stick bugs keep hydrated.  We’ve measured Sticky and she is 12 cubes  (12 cm) long! The babies are only 2 cubes (cm) long.

Yesterday, as you may know, Ms. Shen’s class was kind enough to have an Easter egg hunt for our class where each student got to find an egg with a goodie in it.  We thanked them by writing cards to their class and reciprocated by hiding their eggs for them while they were out for their lunch play time. Finally to welcome in April and April Fools day I had the students take a pop spelling test  that would be used for their report card grades. They all tried their best and their bonus word #11 was “Fools”. They were good sports about my prank. Here is the list of (Dr. Suess) words that they had to try to spell:

Wishing everyone a wonderful 4 day Easter break!

Last week we celebrated 100 day. Here are some things we did!

Can you make a picture with 100?

How tall of a tower can you make with 100 cups? Our tallest tower was 19 cups tall!

100 Day poems:

For Pink Shirt Day we brainstormed what it means to be kind. Here is what we learned:

We also learned about what happens when we are not careful with our words and how it can hurt people’s feelings. We read Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes and each time a character said something mean we wrinkled the heart. We learned that sometimes we can’t undo the hurt that our words can create.

We’ve been working on our Love Monsters since Valentine’s week. Every one of them is unique and special,  just like us!

This week was filled with lots of exciting activities!  We wrote to our Secret Friends and then received the letters our friends wrote to us. We tried to figure out who our friend was and since we knew that they were from Ms. Chatt’s class. Some of us went outside at recess and talked to the other students to do some detective work:)

We finished off our directed drawing dragons and they look beautiful! Happy Year of the Ox!

For Art we have been focusing on Lines and how they are used. We explored chalk to create these beautiful pieces. Thank you Ms. Chatt for the idea!

For Valentine’s Day we made our own pockets to hold our cards.  As you can see there was a lot of love spread to each other through the cards that were exchanged.

We have been focusing on Literacy since we have returned from the break. Specifically, we have been working on how to choose a “just right” book for ourselves.  We can figure out if a book is “just right” by using our 5 finger test:

-Open the book to a random page

-Count the number of words that we don’t know on our fingers

-If we have 0-1 finger up it is too easy. If we have 4-5 fingers up it is too hard. If we have 2-3 fingers up the book is “just right”.

On our library days we choose a book for pleasure (for our family to read to us) and a “just right” book that we can read to our family (because adults like bedtime stories too! )

Monday we had words on shirts day. Tuesday we heard a book read by Karla Gamble our Aboriginal Ed. District teacher. Wednesday we had our PJ day for filling our Warm Fuzzies jar and reading in the dark.  Thursday we had guest teachers (prerecorded) read us stories and on Friday we had a read-a-thon in the gym with our cohort.

We also created a window display showing what we learned from the book, The Two Sisters by E. Pauline Johnson, that we choose for Literacy Week

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This week we visited the Philippines, China, India, Russia and wrapped up our holiday world travels at the North Pole.  We learned about the Parole that is used to decorate during the Christmas season in the Philippines, Chinese lanterns, and Russian Matryoshka dolls.

In India we learned about Diwali, the Festival of Light, and drew fireworks to represent it.

We ended up at the North Pole as our last stop and it was -36 there! Of course, after all our travels we were very tired so we had a bit of a break and watched The Grinch this afternoon.

Wishing all our families a wonderful Winter Break! Looking forward to seeing everyone in the New Year!