Math & Those 'Weird Looking Box Things'

In math we're finishing up our multiplication unit, and decided to use some technology with it!

In groups we created word problems that required multiplication in order to solve. On scrap paper we solved our own questions, and then took our answers to Mrs. Waters. She showed us how to create a QR code on a special website that would show our answer when you scanned it, and she printed it off for us. Next, we turned our word problem into a poster, decorated them, and glued our QR code onto our poster. 

Once our posters were finished, Mrs. Waters hung them up around the classroom, and put an iPad beside each one. We had to read the problem, solve it, and then use the QR code reader app to check if we got the correct answer. It was lots of fun!

We're So Happy!

We had so much fun making this video!

It makes us REALLY HAPPY!!

A Lesson in Multiplication!

Hello Parents! It's Mrs. Waters here with a lesson for you! We've been working a lot on multiplication in our class over the past few weeks, and I thought it might be helpful for you to actually see how we use various strategies in Room 23.  Check out the videos! If you have any questions, feel free to fire me an email! We thought using the Tellagami and Show Me apps would be helpful to teach you! Enjoy!

Mrs. Waters' Tellagami

Distributive Property

Box Method

Standard Algorithm

Giving Back

Our school is a part of the Winnipeg Jets Hockey Academy, which gives students a chance to learn how to play hockey when they normally might not have that opportunity.  The WJHA provides all of the equipment, ice time, coaches, and even nutrition and academic support. Some of our classmates are very fortunate; over half of Room 23 are student athletes!  We know just how lucky we are, and we appreciate EVERYTHING that the WJHA does for us!

We know that one way to give thanks is to give back to our community ourselves. We are big fans of a local lady, Althea Guiboche, and the work that she does in Winnipeg! You might know her as 'The Bannock Lady'. Every week, no matter what the weather is, Althea makes a ton of bannock, gathers things like bottled water, fresh fruit, and granola bars, and goes and feeds our city's homeless. She feeds over a hundred people every week! We think that's pretty amazing!  Doing this every week is expensive though. She gets help with some donations, but the need never ends.

Together with our friends in Mr. B's Grade 4 and 5 class, we are going to try to help her out! This week, on Thursday February 27th, our WJHA student athletes will be competing in the First Annual Heritage School Winter Classic!  It is being held at 1:30pm at the Heritage - Victoria Community Club (our local outdoor rink on Sturgeon Road).  Our entire school will be leaving classes to come support us, but in order to get their ticket to our game, they will be either bringing a toonie, or some food that Althea can use (bannock supplies like flour and baking powder, or bottled water or granola bars).  Althea will be there in attendance to drop the honourary puck for us! 

Anyone who wants to come cheer us on is more than welcome! Also, if you'd like to help us out and make a donation, some of us will be in charge of collecting food and money.

Thanks for your support! Keep your fingers crossed for warm weather!!  :)

Kid President!

Our class LOVES Kid President!  If you haven't seen his work on YouTube, please do yourself a favour and go watch some of his videos! He's a very funny kid, and always has a positive message for kids to hear. His videos make us feel good!

Recently he posted a video about what kids need to know about the world; it's like a how-to video on how to be a good human being.  Watch it here:

He issued a challenge to kids to add to his list, and so we decided to do it!

We made our own list and made a quick video!  Check out what we created!

We hope you like it! We'll be tweeting our video to Kid President! We'll let you know if we get a response!  :)  Keep your fingers crossed!

January Update!

We've been busy!

When we returned from Winter Holidays, we discovered that Santa (the school division), had delivered our iPads! Finally!

We've used them a TON already! We use them to blog and create reading materials for our class.

We also use them to practice our math skills, to research in science and social studies, and we have even used them in phys.ed class to film and analyze our basketball skills!

Group work with the iPads!

Mrs. Waters had to format all of the iPads before we got to use them

Using the iPads in phys.ed class!

We also use them with the 'poll everywhere' website. Mrs. Waters puts a question on the screen and we all answer through our iPads!

In math class we have started subtraction.  It can be tough, but it's fun. We've played some games to work on our skills. We have learned that it is the opposite of addition, so knowing our addition helps us solve problems.

Playing subtraction games!

Baby Henry returned for another visit.  We learned that he got spoiled during his first Christmas!

He was crawling everywhere; he even crawled into one of our lap's!

We weighed him and measured how long he is, and compared it to his weight and height at birth.  He is now 18 lbs. and 27 inches!  He eats all kinds of food now too!

Mrs. Lockhart talking about Baby Henry

We have all brought home forms to fundraise for the Heart and Stroke Foundation.  On January 28th, Heritage School will be hosting a Dance-a-Thon all afternoon!  There are many prizes available to win for people who bring in pledge money, such as a Samsung tablet.  Please try your best to bring in some money to support this very worthy. It's the #1 killer in Canada! Every little bit counts!

We have started Open Mic Fridays.
Open Mic Friday is a presentation that we make in front of our classmates.  We can choose our own topic, and we can bring in materials that will help us present.  It has to be anywhere from 2 to 5 minutes in length. We try to make sure we have good eye contact, speak loudly, and put expression into our voices.  Make sure you practice (in front of your family)!  As an audience member we need to make sure we listen respectfully and pay attention.  The audience also gives feedback to the presenter on what we liked and what we can improve on for next time.

It has been a great beginning to 2014!
Stay tuned for more frequent posts!  :)

More Joy!

One of our goals as a class this school year is to find joy everyday! It can be tough, especially when we are on week 3 of indoor recess... BUT we sure did have some fun this afternoon!

We got together with Mr. B's class and we held a 'Holiday Minute to Win It'! We were put into 4 teams and we had different challenges we had to do. We all had a blast!

Here are some photos of our afternoon!

Reindeer Games - we put vaseline on our noses and had to transfer red pompoms from one plate to another, using only our noses and NO HANDS!

The Cookie Crumble - Mrs. Waters placed a cookie on our foreheads, and we had to move it down our face, into our mouths, without using our hands! We could only use our face muscles.

Almost there!

The Snowman Stack - we had to see how many marshmallow snowmen we could make in one minute, by stacking 3 marshmallows on top of each other.

Extreme concentration!

Snowball Shake - we had a kleenex box full of ten 'snowballs' tied around our waist, and we had to shake all of them out of the box in one minute!

We had some great moves!

Holiday Wreath - we had to toss marshmallows through the wreath, into the Frosty the Snowman container behind. That was tricky!

Holiday Fun!

We played a really fun holiday game this week!  

Here are the instructions in case you want to try it out with your family over the holidays!

THE CHRISTMAS GAME:

All you need are sturdy paper plates and pens for each player.

The leader tells the players to put their paper plate on their head.

Then the leader will give a series of instructions for the players to draw on their paper plates (that are on their heads) without looking.

Here are the instructions:

1. Draw a line for a floor.

2. Draw a Christmas Tree. Add decorations if you feel so inclined.

3. Draw a star on top of your tree.

4. Draw a fireplace with a mantel next to the tree.

5. Draw a stocking hanging from the mantel of your fireplace.

6. Draw a present below the tree.

After the six steps have been given, everyone gets to look at their masterpieces!

The players have to count up how many points they received by following this rubric:

1. 2 points if the tree touches the floor.

2. 2 points if your stocking is touching your mantel.

3. 1 point if your star touches your tree.

4. 1 point if your star is above your tree.

5. 1 point for every Christmas ornament ball that is ON your tree, etc.

6. 1 point if your fireplace doesn’t touch the tree (it’s a fire hazard!). 

7. 1 point if you actually drew something decorative on your stocking.

8. 2 points if your present is under your tree.

Our pictures were awful, but we had a blast playing the game! Try it out!

The drawing process!

And the reveal!

Look at our hilarious drawings!

Winter Painting

Today was Friday the 13th, but we were pretty lucky! We had PJ day because yesterday was our Holiday Concert. We were exhausted! We decided we earned a day to be LAZY! We turned on the fireplace and spent the morning reading, relaxing, and watching a movie. After lunch we went for a quick library class to stock up on new books for the break, and then we did a fun art project.  We were making birch trees scenes at either night or dusk. 

To begin, we had to decide if we wanted our scene to be oriented either landscape or portrait. Next we took green painters tape and created our trees with branches.

We had to make sure that there were no air bubbles in the tape, or else it would ruin our nice white trees.  Our next step was to take watercolour paints and cover the whole paper in colour. We had to make sure all of the white parts of the paper were covered.

Once we were done painting and our paper was wet, we sprinkled some salt on our paper. When our papers dry with the salt, it will look like snow (hopefully)!

Stay tuned for part two on Monday!

Here are some photographs of us being lazy. Enjoy!

Have a great weekend!

Indigenous Science!

We have spent some time talking in Social Studies class about Indigenous contributions to science. Indigenous people have been scientists for thousands of years, and the science community is finally starting to realize just how useful their traditional knowledge is to our world today.  Indigenous have a very sophisticated understanding of the world around us, as they traditionally depended on the land and its plants and animals to survive.

We learned some really interesting things! We studied the engineering ideas behind building homes such as tipis, igloos, and pit houses, and how to build the right kind of canoe for certain bodies of water.  We learned that they used astronomy in order to find their way around. They use their knowledge of animals and ecology to understand sustainability. 

Did you know:

-when a habitat is becoming polluted, frogs are the first animals to go? 

-when the grasshoppers are active and singing, the air conditions are ideal to dry meat like fish?

-a birch bark canoe can carry 40 times its own weight?

-a well-built igloo can hold the weight of a fully grown adult?

-there are many plants in nature that Indigenous people use for medicine? For example, red willow acts as a medicine similar to Aspirin, and cedar can be boiled as a tea to treat colds and flus

We are happy to see that natural resource businesses such as forestry and fishing are starting to use the knowledge that Indigenous people have in order to better protect our environment.

Here's some photos from our design projects:

We tried building canoes out of tin foil! We were able to get most of them to stay upright in the water, and to also hold some weight (marbles)!

Building an igloo is an art. It spirals gradually from the bottom to the top.

Trying to figure out how to build a pit house.

Tipi building is tough! One pole can take the whole tipi down!

More igloo construction

Working together to figure it out!

Catching Up!

Between report cards and preparing for student-led conferences, we have been pretty chaotic in Room 23! Mrs. Waters can't wait until things settle down, but it may be while before that happens- we are already in holiday concert mode too!

Some of us practicing our word study words on our amazing whiteboard table!
The only time we're allowed to graffiti!

Constable Cain came to see us again today! She talked with us about
online safety.

Check out this link to see some great resources about internet safety:

Net Smartz

Our finished staff bulletin board! We worked hard at interviewing staff members,
and then doing the write-ups!

KidBlog!

Our class is going to be starting something new and exciting!

We've been blogging as a class for a while now, and I think my students are ready for a new challenge: writing their own blogs!!

Now don't get too scared, I'm not turning the kids loose into cyber space!  There's a really neat platform that we'll be using called 'Kidblog', which is specifically designed for younger kids to learn the art of blogging SAFELY.

This link can give you some more information:

Why Kidblog?

The kids and I have spent a lot of time talking about why we blog, and what makes a good blogpost.  We've emphasized a lot about personal safety, and how to be a responsible digital citizen. This is going to be a great place for them to further develop their writing skills, and will serve almost as a digital portfolio of sorts! They will have the opportunity to see their writing grow over the school year!

The great thing about Kidblog is the fact that I will still have control over what is being published; when a student wants to post their work, it automatically gets submitted to me for approval first. I receive an email and get the chance to approve, deny, edit, or comment on whatever is being created.  Once it meets the criteria that we have set as a class, then I will approve it.

Another great thing is I can give parents specific passwords to view their child's writing!

How to choose a great title

What makes a good blogpost?

We have also practiced and designed our own paper blogs in preparation for the 'real thing'!

Stay tuned! We'll let you know when they're up and running!