It was good to see all the students again after the long weekend. We had a very busy day as all our days seem to be.

The students are writing some amazing paragraphs in class. We will soon be adding some dress-ups to the paragraphs to make them more interesting. Dress-ups include “because”, -ly words, adjectives, who/which clauses and others.

As hinted at in the title, we are looking at mapping skills. We spent the last few social classes mapping on Google Earth where we have been in BC and it is amazing when we looked at the map, all the places our class has been in Canada. If you haven’t tried Google Earth it is a free download from here. I also talked to the students a little bit about Geocaching. This is a neat activity to do with your GPS device if you have one. In geo-caching, you plug in coordinates into the GPS device which will lead you to a “treasure”. You get the coordinates from a site called GeoCaching. It is free to sign up. Once you are registered, you can find geocaches in your area. The site will give you the coordinates, which you then plug into your geocache device. The GPS device will lead you to the treasure within about 3 metres at which point you will have to look around for the treasure. Usually they are in tupperware or old military shell cases. The last time I checked there were tons of sites around Abbotsford. It is a great activity to involve the family in and have fun outdoors. GPS devices can be purchased at Wal-mart. I find the Magellan ones are the best to use. If you would like more information. Come and see me after school. The great thing is that it can also be integrated into Google Earth which will pinpoint where the geocache sites are on the map.