Month: February 2015

Tennis, anyone?

We had a great time last week with Marcus, our tennis instructor.  Students had four lessons (one per day) where they learned many skills needed to play tennis.  These lessons were a great deal of fun for the students.  I was amazed at how well the students performed these skills.  I will be sending home an information paper about a tennis camp that Marcus will be running out of the racket club near Burnaby Lake this summer.  This looks like a great opportunity as non-club members are able to participate in these lessons.

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Lunar New Year Celebrations

Next Thursday will be Lunar New Year.  We will be having our traditional dumpling making, our assembly, and our pot luck luncheon.  A form about this has already been sent home.  We will be performing a poem at the assembly.  A copy of this poem will be sent home tomorrow for students to do extra practise.

Last week we began making our lanterns.  These are being made out of water colour paper, on which the students have painted a scene.  Tomorrow they will be drawing lines on the back, cutting them part way through, adding a top and bottom border, and turning them into lanterns.  These will be hung in the gym, along with other lanterns created by other classes, as decoration for our assembly.

JUMP Rope for Heart

On February 6th we participated in our JUMP event, during the afternoon, with our Division 2 buddies.  We had a lot of fun doing a variety of skipping techniques including partner skipping and the long rope.  We decorated our paper hearts and began the heart wall in the gym.  Other classes added their hearts to the wall, as well.

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Through the generosity of our parent community we have raised a great deal of money for the Heart and Stroke Foundation – over $2800.

Penguin Art

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Students began by creating a water coloured background.  They then created construction paper penguins and placed them on paper icebergs.  These penguins were adorned with a variety of decorations, as the students chose.  They then used white paint and created a snow blizzard by using Q-tips as paint brushes.

Penguin Research

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We have been doing research on a variety of (six) penguins with Mrs. Anstee, our librarian.  We began as a whole class learning about the Adelie penguin.  We then divided into 5 groups of 4 students to work on a different penguin (as a group) each week.  These penguins are: the Gentoo, the Galapagos, the Rockhopper, the Little Fairy, and the Chinstrap.  We have two weeks left in our research timeline.  Each week the students have completed a booklet on one of these penguins.

In addition to this research we have created a height chart (with the penguins and the students recorded on it).

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Students have enjoyed doing their research and learning about penguins.

Welcome to Pringle, the Penguin!

In January we had a delivery from the Antarctica.  It was a penguin (named Pringle), the novel Mr. Popper’s Penguins, and a letter from Admiral Drake – a character from the novel.  We have been reading this novel over the past few weeks and we will finish it up this week.  Pringle has been making home visits with students in the classroom.  The students have been making journal entries about their experiences with Pringle.  Each morning the students read these journal entries to the class and share their pictures.  Pringle has also been adorned with a variety of necklaces, bracelets, and ribbons as a result of these visits.

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Mobile Dairy Classroom

On January 16th we were lucky to have a visit from the Mobile Dairy Classroom.  A huge trailer came onto our school grounds with a mother dairy cow and her baby calf.  Students learned what cows eat, how they have 4 stomachs to digest their food, and how they produce milk.  They saw the cow being milked by the milking machine and saw the calf being feed this milk via a baby bottle.

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It was a very enjoyable and educational experience for all of us.