Terry Fox Day!

Thankfully, the weather cooperated and we were able to complete our Terry Fox Walk this afternoon.  Prior to the actual walk, our class attended an assembly where we learned some important information about Terry by watching some video clips about him and his Marathon of Hope.  When we returned to our class, we continued our fact finding mission by reading a book about Terry.  I challenged the class to try to write down as many facts as they could about Terry Fox.  I gave a star for every fact they could recall and record.  I am pleased to say that I gave out a lot of stars today.  We will always remember Terry Fox.  His courage and determination were admirable.  Thank you for helping Terry's memory live on today and for continuing his 'Marathon of Hope'.  Together, we raised a significant amount of  money for cancer research!  Well done everyone!

']

[/

Hat Day!

We had a great "Hat Day" in Grade 2/3!  Everyone came wearing a hat of some kind and this shows that we have 'school spirit' in our classroom.  We started out by thinking about all of the different kinds of hats that exist.  We each chose 4 kinds of hats and surveyed our friends to determine which was their favourite (great tallying/data collection practice).  We discussed 'adjectives' - describing words!  We created a list of words that could be used to describe our hats colour, size, texture and overall appearance.  We wrote clues about our hats using these words and then used these to try to guess who's hat was being described! Using describing words to enhance our writing will continue to be encouraged!

Math on the Move!

We have been working really hard during our Math time, but we've been having a lot of fun while we work.  We really enjoy the activities that allow us to move around the room talking about and practicing various math concepts/skills.
*We are reviewing 2 and 3 digit numbers, comparing and ordering numbers, reading and writing number words.
*We are representing numbers in tallies to show data.
*We played a tally game to practice making and counting tallies.
*We gathered our own data by asking our friends a survey question and recorded answers in tallies.   *We learned how to talk/write about our data (this is called 'interpreting') to say what we found out.  Knowing the most and least popular responses is still good, but knowing how to compare different parts of the data is our goal.  We call these "million dollar interpretations".
*We practiced working with others to organize a set of data and create a pictograph.  Key features of graphs (title, axis labels and the scale) were added.

All this and it's still only the third week of school!

Ipads in Action

Our class is very fortunate to have access to the ipad cart for a whole day every week.  On our class ipad day, we try to engage in learning opportunities that allow us to use this fabulous technology.  As the year progresses, we will learn to use different apps to show our thinking, find information and practice important skills from various subject areas (ie. math games, word games).  This week we enjoyed using the ipads to help us find out specific information about insects.  We learned how to find a book on 'Epic' and researched what different insects eat, where they live and other interesting facts.  We also played a great addition game on the ipads in Math.  We are each assigned a specific numbered ipad so that we can learn to be responsible for it.  We learned how to put our ipads into the cart so they can be charged properly for the next group.  We are looking forward to our next ipad day.  We feel so lucky!  

Life Cycle of a Monarch Butterfly

Since the first day of school, our class has had the opportunity to observe the life cycle of a Monarch Butterfly right in our own classroom.  We have watched our caterpillars (larva) eat milkweed, grow and shed their skin several times until they were big and fat.  We watched them make 'sticky, white stuff' that 'looked like a web' on the top of the tank and then hang upside down in a 'j'.  We then saw our caterpillars disappear into a pale green and gold chrysalis (pupa) and emerge as a beautiful, adult butterfly 12 days later.  While watching the 2 caterpillars that were in the tank, we suddenly noticed 2 more that hadn't been there before.  Where had they come from?  We think we had eggs on the leaves of our milkweed that hatched.  Now those caterpillars (larva) have grown big and fat and have disappeared into their chrysalis (pupa).  We are patiently waiting for them to emerge.
In the meantime, we have done some fantastic writing about each of the stages that we observed!
Ask your child to tell you everything they remember about the lifecycle of a Monarch Butterfly and about how butterflies are different from moths!

Marvelous Mathematicians!

One of the best ways to learn what students already know about Math concepts is to let them loose with various Math manipulatives in the classroom.  Last week, while students were getting to know each other and where to find things in our classroom,  I was busy watching them demonstrate their understanding of various Math skills.  The students rotated through 5 different centers.  Each center allowed them to 'show what they already know' about counting, patterning, adding numbers, sorting and 2 dimensional shapes.  We have some marvelous mathematicians in our room!