Too Much Cuteness!

Our Roots of Empathy baby, Ryder, was back for a visit today! He's now 8 months old!

He has gotten bigger since we saw him last, and he has reached some new milestones. Ryder can sit up on his own, rolls back and forth, and is showing some signs that he wants to start crawling!

He gets up on all fours and tries to crawl, but then flops down onto his chest! He'll get it soon!

Ryder had lots of smiles for us!

He's trying to crawl, but can't quite figure it out...

He enjoyed the taste of his toys!

He says 'good-bye' until next visit!

It was our turn to present at our monthly assembly today.  Most classes read poems or act out a play, but we decided we wanted to make a video! We have been following Commander Chris Hadfield on Twitter; we love looking at the photos he is taking and learning from his 'tweets'.  Our favourite song is 'I.S.S. (Is Somebody Singing)' that he wrote with Ed Robertson from the Bare Naked Ladies (Mrs. Waters had to explain to us who those guys were...).  We decided to do a lipdub of the song! We split the lyrics up amongst our students and made plans of where we were going to film.  We had a lot of fun  creating the video, and Mrs. Waters used iMovie (for the first time) to produce it for us.  It's not perfect, but the students of Heritage really enjoyed the finished product!

We plan on sending our link to Cmdr. Hadfield to see what he thinks!

We hope you like it!

What a Week!

Out of our five school days this week, I was out of the building for three of them. An important part of being a teacher is staying current with Professional Development. I was fortunate to attend some great workshops this week centered around Indigenous (First Nations) topics; one of them specifically with the Treaty Relations Commission of Manitoba. Very interesting and informative!

I came back at the end of Friday to see how my class did without me, and was very pleased to see the Inukshuks they created! It can be tough to work with clay, but the results are spectacular! Ask your student what an Inukshuk is, and why they were built. Canada's North is a fascinating place with a rich history!

A great book written by a class in Nunavut!  We really enjoyed learning some words in Inuktitut!

While at my session this morning, I got an AWESOME little email sent from Ms. Neufeld, our music teacher. My students decided to have some fun in music class with the 'Harlem Shake', which is a hilarious dance video that people are creating all over the world. Search it out on YouTube, and you'll find hundreds of them!  This video made me laugh! I have the funniest group of kids!

Enjoy!!

Have a great weekend!

A Survivor

Room 23 has been on a journey over the past few months, learning as much as we can about the history of the Residential School system. It is a dark chapter in Canada's history, and a very painful one in the lives of many. In fact, we have a few students in our very own class who have family members who had attended. Today was a special day; a friend of Mrs. Waters, Elaine, agreed to come share her own experience in Residential School with us (and Mr. B's room as well). Elaine was taken at age 4, and left the school at age 12. She gave us a very good idea of what life was like for her, the pain she went through, and how it has affected her to this day.

We were honoured to have Elaine join us this afternoon. Miigwetch Elaine. We will not forget.

Elaine talking to our group

Our sharing circle

The jacket that Elaine wore the day she was taken away to the Residential School. She was 4 years old. Her Mom just gave it back to her a few years ago.

Make Division Easier!

We have been working on division in our math class.

We use this sheet to help us figure out division questions.

Your first step is to break down the first number (the dividend) into place value. You circle your number of hundreds, your number of tens, and your number of ones.

You start making groups with the second number (the divisor). In this question, our divisor is 4, so we make groups of 4.

If you have something left that can't fit into a group, you cross it out and transfer it into the next place value group. In this question, there is 1 group of hundreds left. We moved it into the tens column.

Now we make equal groups of 4 in the tens column.

We have a group of tens that couldn't fit in a group, so we crossed it out and transferred it over to the ones column.

Now we make equal groups of 4 in the ones column. In this question we have 1 left over. That is our remainder.

Now count how many equal groups of 4 you circled in each column.

Our answer is 143, Remainder (R) 1.

Enjoy making division easier! Have fun!

Tuesday

Our day in pictures...

Figuring out division in math class!

Our Anishinaabe (Ojibway) word of the week!

Posters around school talking about our Day of Silence on April 18th - 

we'll be staying silent all day to bring awareness for the children in our world who have no voice. 

More attempts at writing poetry! We're getting good! ;)

Room 23 is Awesome!

As if there was any doubt! Want to know why Room 23 is so awesome? 

Check out what we chose to write our very first poem about!

 (with no debate about the topic whatsoever...)

Who doesn't love bacon? 

I'd say our first attempt at writing poetry was a huge success, don't you?

Happy Friday!

Friday was lots of fun! 

Mr. Breul, our favourite substitute teacher, returned for a visit this morning while Mrs. Waters was at a planning meeting. Mr. Breul is a very nice guy and we enjoy seeing him!

We added to our 'what do we know about poetry' list that we've been writing.  As Mrs. Waters reads different kinds of poetry to us, we add our observations to the list.  

Our poetry observations

Friday also means 'Open Mic' day! We have fun on Open Mic Friday.  Every Monday, 5 students have to sign up to do an Open Mic presentation. We can present just about anything, but we have to be able to speak for 3-5 minutes on our topic. Afterwards our classmates give us feedback on how we can improve for our next presentation. There have been a lot of different kinds of presentations.  

We also created our own mini anti-bullying pink shirts on paper. We discussed and brainstormed some good slogan ideas with Mrs. Lockhart, and then we each got to choose which one we were going to put on our t-shirts.

Our slogans

Our word of the week was 'imminent'.  We tried our hardest to use it in our conversations this week!

Have a great weekend everyone!