Just wanted everyone to know . . .

Oilers beat the Canucks 5-4. Oh yeah! Go Oilers!!!!

Sorry! Had to be said.

Monday was a great day!!! The students are having a lot of fun but are also able to get right down to work when we need to get stuff done. Our Daily 3 reading program is really going well and students have made it to 21 mins with non-stop reading!!!

In writing, we are working on ideas for writing using literature as a starting point to writing our own stories. We first took a look at “Tulip Sees America”; a story about a boy and his dog who go on travels throughout the United States describing all the things they see on the way. The students enjoyed the story and we used it as a springboard for our own writing on places we have been too. Using Google Earth, we flew around the world (just like my evil, twin brother Bob. If you don’t know who that is, just ask your child!) and plotted all the places we have been too. Using those places, students then listed things they did there and details about those events or things they remember about that trip. Our last step was to write out our stories about our adventures in the places we visited. The students all wrote some very interesting stories and I will be putting some on the blog very soon! Our next story is going to be an animal story using the book, “If You Give A Pig A Pancake”. Using that book, students will pick their own animal and describe the silly adventures that ensue. It should be quite interesting!

On Oct. 3, Highroad Academy will be offering a seminar on Spell to Write and Read. This is the program we use as our spelling program. We have had tremendous success in improving, not only student’s spelling skills, but also their reading and writing through a focus on phonograms and spelling rules. This seminar is for all new parents to our school or anyone who has not taken the seminar. You can also attend if you need a refresher on the foundations of the SWR program. Please contact me if you wish to attend. If you are new to the school or have not attended this class before, I would strongly, strongly, strongly, strongly encourage you to attend. It is a free seminar and runs from 9 am – 12 pm.

Request for help – For one part of our Daily 3 Reading Program, students will be involved in listening to books on tapes, cd’s and other devices. To fully integrate this into our reading program, I need some more of these devices for the classroom use. If you have any old portable tape player, portable CD players or unused MP3 players kicking around your house that you would not mind donating to the class, please contact me. I am hoping to collect a number of devices to use with the students. I have a few of my own already that we can use. However, the more we have, the more students we can fit into this section of the Daily 3. Thank you!

Sorry . . . Four Things!!!

There is no spelling or memory verse this week due to the shortened week. We will resume with both of those parts of our class program next week.

I hope everyone is having a great weekend. I thought I would give you all a little Sunday gift. I found this video last week and the song has been in my head all week. So I thought that you would appreciate it if I shared it with you so we could all have the song in our head!!! It’s not as bad as an ABBA song (and if you don’t know who ABBA is, ask your parents but don’t, I repeat, don’t play any of the songs. You’ll never get them out of your head. I had one song in my head for three weeks. It was not pretty.)

Anyway, here is the song. It is an old childrens folk song sung by Lisa Loeb.

What a busy day!!!

Today in science we ended off our look at Oobleck with at look at Mars. Now you may be asking what does Mars have to do with Oobleck? Well, that would be a good question!! We talked about Mars because the scientists who created the Mars Rover had to go through the same process to create the Mars Rover that the students did to create their Oobleck Machines.

In the first part of our Oobleck unit, the students had to think about Oobleck, play with it, explore, discover, experiment, test, observe and use their senses. Scientists had to do the same thing. They had no idea what Mars was like and yet had to use what they had (pictures, etc) to come up with a machine that could withstand anything that might happen.

The scientists held a convention to share their ideas, discuss, argue, put ideas together and listen to each other. The students had to do the same thing to create their rules for Oobleck. Finally, both the scientists and students had to use all their observations and ideas to create and design a machine they thought would be able to function on Mars or Oobleck. We had an amazing time discussing and sharing ideas and pictures.

I also showed the students an awesome video showing the Mars Rover leaving Earth and landing on Mars and all the things the Mars Rover had to do in order to land safely and function properly on Mars once it got there. Here is the video:

Dear Parents,

On September 25, 2009, students from Grades 1 to 6 will be participating in the Terry Fox Run in an event called “Toonies for Terry”. As you may know, the Middle School and High School have participated in this wonderful event for the last few years, helping to raise money for cancer research. This year, the Grades 1 to 6 classes have been invited to join the Middle School and High School in this important event.

As part of “Toonies for Terry”, students from the elementary classes will be taking a few minutes throughout the day to run around our school field. We are also asking each student to bring in a toonie to help support this wonderful cause and help the field of cancer research so that, one day, we can develop a cure for this terrible disease. Students may bring their toonies at any time up to the day of the event.

If you have any questions, please feel free to contact me at school.

Thank You!

Happy Monday! Yes, I know that sounds strange. How can you have a Happy Monday? Easy! Come to Mr. H’s class and see all the hard working fun we have!!!

The students had a great day and we got lots of work done. In Language Arts, we are working on a great reading program called The Daily 3. This program strives to build students into independent readers who have the stamina to read for longer and longer periods of time while using a variety of comprehension skills to aid the understanding of what they are reading.

It is a great program and I am already seeing great results. We have started with the first part of the program called Read to Self. The idea of this part of the program is to focus on building stamina and reading for longer periods of time. Right now, the students have reached 11 minutes which is fantastic!!

At the beginning of each reading period we discuss the appropriate behaviours and the three types of reading that students can use to read their books. We talked as a class about reading the words of a story, reading the pictures of a story and re-telling the story. In the next couple of weeks, we are going to be reaching 30 minutes of focused reading everyday. We will also be talking about how to choose appropriate books for their reading ability. The it will be time to move to the next sections of the program: Reading to Others and Listening To Reading. The students are very excited and I have already heard many of the children saying that they love reading.

Here are the spelling words for this week:
Spelling J3

Here is something new this week. I introduced the students to a new website called Spelling City. It is a great site where students can see their spelling words, learn their spelling words, test their spelling words and play games using their spelling words. Whew! That’s a lot of “spelling words” words! The other neat thing is that students can print out handwriting pages with their spelling words and practice handwriting their words. They can even print out the words as sign language and practice signing them!!!! It’s a great site and it’s FREE!!!! I love free!!

All you have to do is click the Spelling City box with the J3 on it below.

Every Monday, there will be another box. Clicking on the box will take you straight to the spelling list for that week.

No hard links to remember, no fancy addresses to type out, no clicking through page after page of websites to get there! No Sireeee!!!!! You just click a simple click on the Spelling City box and you are there.

I have also told the students that if they test themselves and get 100%, they should print out the test results and/or the certificate and bring it to me for a bonus mark on their spelling marks for the report card!!!!

Finally, students received their first memory verses of the year. If you remember, I had sent home a homework reminder for the students to bring in their families favorite memory verses. This year, we are going to use those favorite verses for our memory verses. As these are special verses to people and mean a lot to each of us in different ways, I thought that it would be more meaningful for students to memorize those. Our first verse is below:

Dear Children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

1 John 3:18

Finally, here is a funny video I found. It is hilarious!! Just wait for the surprise at the end!!

At the end of the last school year, one of my students gave me a gift as a thank you. However, it was not just any gift. It was a gift in the form of a project. For those of you, who were with me last year, you will remember the weekly science projects that I assigned as ways to help you to think more creatively or “outside the box”. Well, this students decided to enact some revenge upon me and, with a smile stretching from one side of the face to the other, gave me my gift. The gift also came with a note. The note explained that my homework was to make my own end of the year gift with the supplies within the zip-lock bag. Within the bag were several straw, paper clips, fruity strips of gum, bandaids, toothpicks and a gift certificate from Starbucks. With great dismay, I realized that my summer was not going to easy and that any plans I may of had for a nice relaxing break were going to be replaced by an exceedingly hard and painful summer trying to come up with something that I could make out of those strange and wacky materials.

Well, it was indeed a busy summer but, with much sweat and tears, I was able to eventually create something out of the materials Hannah gave me. I have taken pictures of my creation below and I am extremely proud of it. Here are the results below.

Thank you, Hannah, for making me think. Now I need to go and soak my head in some warm water to help reduce the swelling.

Well, it has been an exciting day here in Grade 2/3 once again! Today for science, we started taking everything we have learned about Oobleck and it’s properties and have begun the process of designing vehicles that would be able to land/drive on an ocean of Oobleck, explore the ocean of Oobleck and be able to get off the ocean of Oobleck without being stuck.

At our last class, we had a convention. Scientists use conventions as a way to share ideas and to see what other scientists have done. At our convention, we came up with a list of important rules or properties we discovered about Oobleck. The students will have to keep these in mind as they design their Oobleck machines.

At the end of the class, we saw a little video showing what would happen if you walked or ran on Oobleck. Here is the video.

This video could help us understand how a vehicle would work on an ocean of Oobleck.

A big thank you to Aidan who discovered what would happen if you put a pan of water on a loud speaker. Aidan said that the water only splashed an made waves which is very different than what happened to the Oobleck.

On a completely different topic, here is our spelling list for the week. You can copy the words down to work on at home or you can just print a copy of the words using the option on the window below or downloading it from the Box.net widget to the right!

Spelling J2

Have a great night. Book orders are due on the 18th of September!

Hey everyone!!!

This week we were looking at the properties of Oobleck. Do you remember what properties are? We can find the properties of objects around us by using our 5 senses; what we see, feel, hear, smell and taste.  So,

Properties are the things or words we use to describe different objects so we can tell them apart.

We played with and investigated the properties of Oobleck to help us understand what made Oobleck different from other substances like water or play-do. You had some wonderful properties you discovered as you worked with the Oobleck. We will talk about them on Friday!

I also had told you that Scientists themselves did not understand why Oobleck had such strange properties but they are working very hard to find out more just like we are!!!!

Here is a video showing what Oobleck does when you put it on top of a very loud speaker!!! What do you notice? Would water do this is you did the same thing? Why don’t you try it and find out?

Finally, here is a Star Wars video for Jacob! I hope you enjoy it!!! I thought it was really funny!

It was a busy day in the Grade 2/3 class!! Students had a full day of fun and excitement. In Science this afternoon, I told students about my discovery of an extremely strange substance. On a cruise to Alaska, my wife and I were wondering along a secluded path. As we walked along, I suddenly noticed this mysterious substance lying in pools along side the path. My wife suggested that I collect some samples to bring back to show the students. Once I had told the students how I came to find this mysterious substance, I told the students that Scientists had no knowledge of this substance and how it came to be. All they knew was that it was named Oobleck and that it was not harmful to teachers and students in grade 2/3. Students then got a chance to play with and investigate it’s properties. We also learned and discussed how we use our 5 senses to investigate the properties of objects. As the students got to play and interact with the Oobleck, the students were very thankful that they didn’t have to use their sense of taste!! However, they did make wonderful observations including that it was green and goopy!!! I love things that are green and goopy!!!

As students played with the Oobleck, they were writing down what they saw, felt, heard and smelled and recording their thoughts on pieces of paper. After discussing all their thoughts, they then had to pick the one property they felt was the most important property of Oobleck. Next Science day, we are going to review their notes and create a set of rules for Oobleck. Throughout this unit on Oobleck we are ging to be talking about Scientists and how they work through problems. It is going to be very interesting!!!!!

Parents:

Please practice adding and subtracting facts with your child. Over the summer, some memories can become hazy and students can have difficulty remembering their adding and subtracting facts up to 18. Please review these for them so we can sharpen those response times!!! It also helps provide a solid base for all their math work if they don’t have to be slowed down remembering their basic facts. If you need some ways to create flash cards for your child, check out Flashcard Creator or just make your own on cut rectangles of construction paper. You can also buy them from many grocery stores like Superstore or Staples.