Halloween Week Part 2

What a great week!! Fun activities, fun trip and a fun dance! What more could we ask for. Kinderland is simply rockin'.

Before we begin the blog we want to once again say thank you for all the kindness and support we keep receiving from ALL parents and guardians. We are so blessed to have such amazing students and amazing home-school connections. Let's keep this going because this enhances your childs learning experiences. 

Please Note: Clothing drive at kiss and ride this Monday!! Get your extra old stuff out and let's donate what we can. 

Now for the rest...

We know you all got this photo already but we needed to post it as it is just the cutest group photo ever.

Halloween fun at our school...

We really loved all the costumes and the students loved the special Minion cupcakes (Thanks to Ms. Flor for making them!).

P.S check out Twitter for some of our dance videos from the dance.

MOUNTSBERG TRIP

Thank you so much to our four parent volunteers who attended this trip with us. You were fantastic and you embraced the inquiry in the forest. This made our experience even better and all the monkey doodles loved it.

Below are some photos from our trip.

The students were led on nature inquiries in two groups by Mounstberg staff. Each was taken into a forest area and each group explored based on their own interests. We have tried to gather as many photos as we could from parents/staff to try to include all students in this post but we are sorry if we missed anyone.

We found beautiful horses on our nature walk and some students were able to touch them and use their sense of touch to describe what they feel like. Beautiful horses that were descendants from French horses from the war.

The other group may not have seen horses but they found Solar Panels!! Some students were curious to find out what they are used for and what they feel like.

Climbing around the forest in the trees. "Peek a Boo"

Mountsberg was full of areas to explore!

We were also able to have a break from just exploring and use it to be active and jump around on hay stacks.

The Predator birds area was filled with neat birds or prey and learning opportunities.

The students were extremely eager to learn about the birds of prey. They kept asking what they eat and what their names are. One group even got to meet a huge bird up close. Can you see what kind it is?

All the birds here have been given safe homes after being injured in the wild and have been rehabilitated. They are not strong enough to survive in the wild but are now cared for and used to help us learn more about them.

So what is inquiry at Mounstberg?

"Inquiry-based learning means that we are honouring our children’s ability to drive their own learning. We are placing student questions and ideas at the centre of the learning process. Students are encouraged to ask questions and then investigate their own queries about the world. Inquiry-based learning is part of an emergent curriculum. It does not mean that the educators are relinquishing their role. Educators use their knowledge of curriculum and expectations, and their expertise to extend learning. They ask open-ended questions and engage students in problem-solving." (Journeytogetherfdk.com) 

So at Mounstberg students were placed in situations where their inquiry was based on their love for fall and nature. Their inquiry was somewhat provoked with various materials in the forest but overall they self regulated and chose their own various learning opportunities. Below are some examples.

Some students picked FUNGUS off trees and we later used descriptive words to talk about it and asked our guide about it. We also used this as a counting activity.

Trying to figure out how to tie up one of our volunteers.

We worked on building by talking about the materials and their length and sizes in order to choose proper ones to build scales, beams to cross and tee pees.

Some of our students were interested in thin and thick as well as long and short roots and decided to dig to find them along the way we also learned about worms and where they like to live.

Other groups really enjoyed exploring the various leaves and trees. We also learned that moss that grows on stumps and rocks a long time ago was used in baby cradles, baby diapers and toilet paper by Native Americans NEATO.

Patterning with leaves.

We noticed some Geese and tried to fly south just like they would in the shape of a V.

Above is a photo of the forested area one of our groups was left to explore with guides and adults. 

We also had fun riding the bus and some of us got very sleepy on the ride back!

Have a safe Happy Halloween everyone!

Halloween Week Part ONE

Halloween has inspired lots of learning opportunities in our classroom. Writing, making stories and reading are some and others are based around science and math too! Not to mention lots of fun art activities. We also had a visitor Mr. G who was in to cover for Mrs. Latus and our students loved learning with him and thought he was Trudeau's brother! Enjoy the blog!

A reminder for tomorrow:

A blog after a few days (another blog will be posted after trip day and Halloween day at school).

The students wanted to practise writing out Halloween words and below you will see their hard work. When doing so they also worked on letter and letter sound recognition.

We knew we would decorate pumpkins eventually so we created beautiful art work to share what we would like our jack-o-lanterns to look like. This was after we read a wonderful story about pumpkins. We have some great artists in the class.

We love letting the students choose and by doing so learn more about quantity, graphing and numbers. We allowed them to choose which Halloween book they would like to have read to them by voting. Everyone had a day and was allowed to vote and "The Littlest Pumpkin" won!! It was a great story and we encourage you to ask your children what it was about.

After graphing we counted and tallied our votes and the students wrote the corresponding numbers.

We than brought out our cutie little pumpkins and chalkboards. No one asked the students to do anything specific but some were inspired to add using the pumpkins and to practise numbers. Little pumpkins are the cutest!!

We have seen little treats in all lunch bags and the grade 7's had fun helping us get wrappers after Mrs. Sanszole treated them to yummy goodies. We have been using the wrappers to work on High Frequency words "I" and "like" to write short sentences about which candy would be the best to eat.

The little pumpkins were given to our monkey doodles with plenty of materials to create their own designs. We have been having a great time at this center!

Our pumpkin investigation has been a BLAST. It began with some predictions and now we are starting to see if we guessed correctly. Today we found out that our large pumpkin had 596 seeds!! We learned how to count by 10's by sorting seeds together as a group, onto plates and counting them after we learned a song about counting by 10's. What a fun activity and we challenge you to count your seeds at home too. However, you may want to count the seeds from the smaller pumpkin as this was quite the challenge.

We have also been using various materials to check the circumference of the pumpkin and see how tall it is with classroom math manipulatives.

The most fun...was getting messy and seeking out our seeds. Ooeyyyy Goeeeyyy messes sure are amazing! Get in and have fun at home and use good descriptive words to think about how the pumpkin feels.

Each student received 10 seeds to help us count by 10's.

Measurement is so much fun...especially when Mr. G was here and we learned how to measure how tall he is. Thanks Mr. G for making this activity a blast and we hope to see you again one day.

Teachers have special Halloween powers and wrote secret messages which some students tried to uncover. A fun way to recognize letters and names.

Oh and little skeleton fun in art is always great. 

Just a note about FRIDAY and COSTUMES:

*some parents have been asking and we have 31 students in the class.

*you may dress up with no weapons or masks and nothing too scary. In order to dress up we are asking for non-perishable canned good donations.

Lots of prayers tonight for a rain free trip!