What a fun few days we have had this past week.  Lots of crafting has been going on from making potato prints, snowflakes to adorn our windows and decorating our classroom door.

On Thursday we read the story Tough Cookie: A Christmas Story by Edward Hemingway.  The class enjoyed the book but had even more fun decorating our own Tough Cookie decorations.   The best part was when the decorations came to life at recess and the class with Ms. Dente went on a gingerbread hunt through the school looking for clues and trying to find them!    Only one more week before the Winter Break but there is lots more fun in store with our school wide Holiday Cheer days.

Ms. Pasqualetto :0)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

In continuing with our theme of being Kitchener Hawks who are kind and accepting we read the story “The Name Jar” by Yangsook Choi.  It is about a little girl who moves to America from Korea and on the bus to school she is teased when kids can’t pronounce her name. She tries to choose a new name that her peers can pronounce and many of her classmates give her thoughtful suggestions.   The question becomes should she have to change her name?   As a class we talked about differences and accepting others for the things that make us unique.  We talked about our names and when I asked if anyone knew of any stories about how their names were chosen to which there was a lot of shrugged shoulders and “my parent’s named me” 🙂  This is why there was the about my name sheet in the planner today.

We are very excited to start learning about the class’s Family Holiday Traditions.  The past three days we learned that both Ms. Dente and Ms. Pasqualetto’s families celebrate Christmas and that Ms. Lee’s family celebrates Lunar New Year.   Please double check the pink December calendar that was sent home this past Monday to see what day your child is presenting and stapled to the newsletter was the sheet we hope they will fill out about your family traditions.  While many children will focus on the upcoming holiday season (they are pretty excited), please feel free to choose any tradition that is special to your family.

Have a wonderful weekend!
Ms. Pasqualetto :0)

In class we have been discussing feelings and how it is OK to like different things and to feel different ways about the same ideas/activities/experiences.  One question that we explored was what brings us joy?  This is what we came up with and is displayed on our hallway bulletin board along with some festive name art 🙂

Ms. Pasqualetto :0)

What an amazing day!  The weather was perfect for all of our spooky festivities and hopefully it stays just as nice for the main event this weekend for the kids. Here are a few highlights from today:

We started the morning with a crisp and cool Halloween costume parade.  The kids had a great time standing outside looking at the classes parade from the big building around the outside of the annex and then we continued the parade through the annex for our classes to return to our rooms.  Here we are standing outside waiting for the older kids to walk by.

We made pumpkins on gates using playdoh and loose parts to replicate the 5 Little Pumpkins Poem (will be posted to your child’s eports soon), watched a movie version of the book Room On The Broom, decorated our class door and read some spooky stories.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Have a spooktacular Halloween! and don’t forget that it is pyjama day on Monday!

– Monarch Butterfly aka Ms. Pasqualetto :0)

Today was a busy day in Division 17!

The whole school participated in International Shake Out Day in the morning.   We had a class discussion around what earthquakes are and why we need to practice what to do in the event that we ever had one during school time.  The kids did an amazing job and had some great ideas and answers to questions during our discussion.

We also had a guest reader come and read a story with our class and teach us a Halloween chant.  Mrs.  Wong Reinhardt had a great time visiting our room and we will look forward to her future Friday visits.

Here is the chant and ask them if they remember what the ending is which didn’t make it into my photo 🙂

Have a great weekend!

Ms. Pasqualetto :0)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Wow are things ever changing and growing in Division 14!

We are so proud of all of the growth that our class has shown over the past 7 months and how much the kids are challenging themselves to try to do their very best.  We hope that everyone loved seeing all the examples of the hard work that they put into their learning and that you were able to celebrate all their successes with them.

Spring has definitely sprung around the school.  The class had a great time participating in our school yard cleanup for Earth Day and we liked going on a tour of the school looking at the different signs of Spring.  Our class we noticed that our potatoes love being outside.  We have made many observations but some of the key ones are that the plants seem stronger, that they are a darker green colour than before and that the plants are getting more and more leaves.  We hope that you have had a chance to take a peek at our plants that are just outside of our classroom but if not here are a couple pictures of them from when we first put them out and again just the other day.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

We have also been noticing a lot of changes with our butterfly larvae that joined our classroom in the middle of April.  Almost all of them have taken their chrysalis forms, we are just waiting for one last one to transform before we move it to the flight enclosure.  Here are a few pictures of the progress of their transformations.

We can’t wait to see what happens next!

Ms. Pasqualetto :0)

 

 

We celebrated HAWKS Day on Thursday and fun was had by all.  We started our morning by discussing what makes us all Kitchener HAWKS (Helpful, Accepting, Working hard, Kind and Safe) and then we had fun trying out mini golf.  Lots of our friends were trying it for the first time and we talked about how it was good to try new activities and that the important part was for us to have fun!   Everyone did such a great job running the obstacle course which involved actions of balancing, ducking, jumping and running.  The kids showed awesome sportsmanship cheering everyone on and a definite highlight from the day was having fresh popped popcorn!

In the afternoon we planted our potatoes as part of the Spuds in Tubs program by Agriculture in the Classroom.  We talked about what plants need to grow and read a story called Alex’s First Seed.   We gave our spuds their first big drink of water and it will be interesting to observe if anything changes when we get back to school after Spring Break.

We hope that everyone has a fun filled Spring Break and we can’t wait to see everyone in two weeks on March 29th.

Ms. Pasqualetto :0)

On Friday we read the story  The Gingerbread Man and the Leprechaun Loose At School By Laura Murray.  We had a discussion about St. Patrick’s day and we talked about Leprechauns and their love of shiny things and how they like to store their treasures at the end of a rainbow.  In the story the Leprechaun is quite the prankster so for our journal writing we thought about ways that we could try to trap a leprechaun if it was in our home or school and trying to steal our treasures.

As the weather didn’t allow for us to see a rainbow outside we tried making one in our classroom. Using the things we learned in our walking water experiment from the week before we put on our Scientific hats and made predictions about what would happen in the empty jars.  We were right! since last time the empty jar between the yellow and red jars filled up and made orange, we predicted that the empty jars would fill with orange, green and purple this time.  We got to see it happen right before our eyes.  The neatest part was that when we left it over the weekend you could really see the rainbow not only in the jars themselves but on the paper bridges.

Have you seen a full rainbow before?

Ms. Pasqualetto :0)

In class we have been learning about Matter and Force and Motion.  Last week we did some experimenting with how different objects move.  The students loved using different ramps to try and see how far we could get a ball to move without falling off of the track.

Yesterday we did an experiment to see if we could get water to move from one glass container to the other.  We put on Scientist thinking caps and discussed our predictions about what we thought would happen.  We were pretty surprised to see that in the end water was able to travel through a paper towel and into the third empty jar.  Unfortunately it was moving pretty slowly so we decided to leave the experiment over the weekend to see what it would look like on Monday when we get back to class.  Here is one photo from about 40 mins after we started the experiment and then another taken after approximately 4 hours.

What do you think the jars will look like on Monday?

I hope you had a great Pro-D Day!

Ms. Pasqualetto :0)

February is going to be a very busy month in Division 14.

At the end of January we had our Literacy Day celebration at the school.  Ms. Laity’s class won the door decorating contest and we had fun re-creating our favourite story book covers that have been uploaded to the student’s e-portfolios and wearing our shirts with words on them.    We then moved straight into a seasonal discussion about animals, hibernation and making predictions about if a groundhog might see it’s shadow.

Over the past couple of weeks we have been working with yarn and practicing our lacing/sewing skills.  What many students thought would be a really easy activity turned out to require lots of patience and concentration.  In the end everyone was happy with their heart creations and we had lots of comments about how soft and fluffy the stuffing was 🙂

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Family day is quickly approaching and we have loved hearing about our families and making connections with each other during our special helper calendar time.  The special helper pages that your children are completing are going up on our wall as well as the family photos that you have been sending in, so thank you!

Ms. Dente and Ms. Pasqualetto :0)