Month: November 2020

 Taking our learning outside on a regular basis is definitely a silver lining that we are enjoying this year.  It gives us a chance to socialize, exercise, decompress, breathe and connect with nature.

Every morning we begin our day with a time called “Outdoor Awakenings.”  The students are eager to connect with their friends and LOVE to converse, so we all head to the field and do one ‘social lap,’ where everyone spends some time chatting and catching up.  After the social lap, it’s time to get moving!  We have been experimenting with various ways to move around the track and then making mathematical observations related to the data we collect.  This week we started the Kilometre Club, where we keep track of the distance we run as a class and set goals for ourselves.  We have also been working on getting our heart rates up, keeping our target heart rates in mind.  Finally, we head inside and chart our progress and create goals for the next day.  Outdoor Awakenings has been a great way to clear our heads and get prepare our minds for learning.

We have also been enjoying nieghbourhood walks and Forest Fridays.  We read a book called Mr. Peabody’s Apples, which is all about the impact that a rumor can have on a community.  To demonstrate how rumors spread (and how impossible it is to ‘unspread’ a rumor), Mr. Peabody asked Jimmy to cut open a feather pillow and let the feathers blow away in the wind.  Then he asked Jimmy to pick up all the feathers.  Jimmy found feathers around the community weeks and months later, and every time, he was reminded of the impact of his actions.  Our class examined this concept from a positive perspective, and it came to light that it would be just as easy to spread positivity in your community.  We wrote positive messages on feathers and the next time we went on a neighbourhood walk, we spread the feathers around for people to find.  My son happened to find one on his way home from school a few days later and was quite delighted and touched!

Our current Social Emotional Learning theme is  gratitude, and we have been focusing on the three different parts of gratitude:

• • the noticing parts of it- the appreciating, the awareness, the thoughtfulness
  • the action parts of it- expressing thanks, acts of kindness
  • the positive emotion it brings – small moments of joy that have been proven to bring us great health

When we spend time outside, we heighten our ability to notice the beauty around us.  Over the past several weeks, our eyes have been drawn to the stunning leaves falling from all the mighty trees in our neighbourhood.  We love the interesting shapes, vivid colours and plentiful variety of leaves and trees that surround us.  We have collected different types of leaves and have pressed them and used them for several art projects.  Bringing nature into our classroom is definitely a highlight of every week.

What is peace to you?  How do you find peace and how do you spread it to others?  This week we enjoyed expressing our ideas about peace through poetry, literature, art and conversation.

We started the conversation through our community circle, followed by the book Peace by Wendy Anderson Halperin.    This book is filled with beautifully detailed illustrations and thought provoking quotes, all having to do with how to build peace one person, one heart, one home, one neighborhood at a time.

In small groups, we created our own concentric circles and worked together to share ideas about what peace would look like in our hearts, homes, school, neighbourhood, city, country and in the world.  The students added their favourite quotes from the story to each section.

Check out Wendy Halperin’s By Heart Project to find peace quotes from the book with illustration guides!  Peace #65 has guided illustrations for the Peace book that we read.

We created Haiku poems and Lantern poems, carefully choosing words to create meaningful patterns that conveyed thoughtful messages about peace.  Haiku poems have 5 syllables in the first line, then 7 in the second line followed by 5 in the third.  Lantern poems start with one syllable, then two, three, four and back to one, in order to create a poem that is in the shape of a lantern.  We had lots of fun brainstorming peace-related words of all different syllables and then combining them to create different patterns.  The poems were beautiful!

Finally, we created realistic poppies, inspired by Georgia O’Keeffe’s close-up, large scale flower paintings, and in particular her paintings of poppies.  We took notice of her technique of using rounded lines and vivid colours, and created our own works of art using oil pastels.  We love how unique each students’ artwork turned out to be.