A big welcome back! I hope everyone had a wonderful Spring Break! It is hard to believe that we are almost at the end of the year!
Here is the spelling list for the week along with the links to Spelling City:
Here are the links to Spelling City!
Uh-Oh a Boat! A creaky, leaky boat!
Can’t go over it!
Can’t go under!
Got to go through it!
Creaky! Creaky! Creaky!
Going on a field trip . . . .
I think I have been reading too many kids books with my daughter! Anyway, it’s fieldtrip day tomorrow and I wanted to just give some info before we go.
Students are still expected to wear uniforms though it does not have to be full dress. As we are there all day, students will need to pack a lunch for the trip. We will be leaving at 8:30 sharp! So please try to have you child here by 8:25. We need to be there for 9:45! We are expecting to be back sometime around 3:30.
If you have a digital camera, please bring it along. It would be great to get some pictures, not only for the blog but for our slideshow at the end of the year!
If you asked to be a volunteer, I should have put a note in your child’s planner! If that did not happen, just come see me before and after school and we can chat! As it is only our class going, there is room on the bus for everyone!
Looking forward to a great day!
We will be having our unit test for Weather on Friday. I have put together a little study guide for the test, which you can look at and/or print out below.
So I was sitting on the coach taking a breather from a long day of working and thought to myself, “I need to get more fun stuff on the blog!” So here goes:
Just a reminder that tomorrow is our one year anniversary of Canada winning the gold at the Olympic Men’s Hockey tournament. It was such an exciting day. Remember to wear your Canada, Olympic or hockey gear tomorrow. Here is the magical memory from our friends at Youtube!
So, if you are feeling in the Olympic spirit and want to get into some physical activity but don’t happen to have an Olympic speed skating track in your basement, here is an easy to make ping pong game. Just get a couple of juice containers like in the picture and a wooden stick. Cut some holes through the juice containers (maybe get your parents to help. You don’t want to get an Olympic size injury!) and insert the wooden sticks through the holes. Voila! There is your ping pong game. Now, all you need is some paddles and a ping pong ball. If anyone wants to make one for the class and bring it in to show us, that would be fantastic!
Our dining room table gets used a lot and not just for dining. We eat at our dining room table nightly but after the dishes get cleared, let the ping pong games begin! We turned our dining room table into a ping pong table. You can do it, too, by following these easy steps.
Ping Pong Table: DIY Project Materials Needed
- 2 plastic containers (one for either side of the “net”) that holes can be poked into (I suggest Odwalla juice). Must have lids.
- Pennies, marbles, sand or rocks to weight the plastic containers.
- Wood dowel to make a “net” to reach across your table.
- Screw driver or scissors to poke hole in plastic container.
- 2 ping pong paddles and balls.
First, empty, clean, and dry plastic containers.
Fill bottoms of each container with your material of choice. I used pennies. Put on lid. Consider gluing lids on if you have little ones around.
Cut holes with scissors, screw driver or other tool.
Push wood dowel through holes.
Finally, here is a little learning fun for you. Not related to anything in our science this year, but learning is still fun no matter what it is or where it comes from. And who says we have to learn just what we have been told to learn. So here is a neat video showing the distance our Moon actually is from us.
Did you catch it? There was some stuff about light which is what we are studying now! If you missed it, watch it again. First person to tell me that it takes light one second to get to Moon, gets a prize!
Enjoy and we’ll see you tomorrow!
Here are the spelling words and links to Spelling City for the week. Scroll all the way to the bottom for a special treat!
Here are the links to Spelling City! Remember! You can bring in your completed Spelling City test with 100% on it to receive an extra point on your spelling test! Why lose out on this great deal! Get your free mark today!
I found this picture the other day as I was roaming around on the net. Seeing as we all love Star Wars so much and also as we mourn the loss of our AT-AT and look towards the day when we get it back, I thought I would include this picture for fun! Enjoy!
Hi! It’s Mrs. Goosen here. Last Thursday I sent home a study guide to help your child prepare for the Inuit test this Thursday afternoon. I will also post it here in case the guide didn’t make it home. We will end off our unit with a movie called AnArctic Tale – a really great documentary type movie following some arctic animals. If your child would like to bring some snacks to eat during the movie they are welcome to do so…I will bring a little snack for the class to share as well.
Thanks & happy studying!
Mrs. Goosen
For your information, I have added the dates of the FSA’s to the online blog calendar. There are quite a few of them and I have tried to space them out as best as I could while also leaving some time for helping the students to prepare for them. Please remember to practice the online FSA’s and the practice math questions that were sent home last week with your children!
Here is the spelling for the week. I know, I know! You have been waiting, eager to get going on it!
Here are the links to Spelling City. Don’t forget! You can bring in your completed spelling test with 100% on it and receive a bonus mark for your spelling test!
Pockettales has been a new experience for us this year. Moving our home reading program onto the web as been lots of fun and has been a positive experience for the students as they build their reading at home to gather badges, points, and levels. While we want students to enjoy reading for reading sake, sometimes a small amount of motivation can help with getting students to move forward with their reading.
Pockettales has become a great friend to us here at the class blog and I thought it would be neat to give them an opportunity to speak about their motivations for creating this site and where they hope to go with it. Yaw was very excited to contribute and share his thoughts.
When I was young, I wasn’t the best reader. On top of that, I was always worried that when I started a new book, I wouldn’t like it. I was afraid of spending time reading a new book only to find out halfway through that I wasn’t really interested in it. My lack of interest in reading led me to do worse in my English and Literature classes than the others I was taking, and my poor grades quickly made me lose interest in reading altogether.
In 2nd grade, my teacher let us play a game in class called Number Munchers. It was this really fun game where you had to solve a math problem, and once you found the answer you moved a tiny little green monster to the correct number and he would eat it! My friends and I would challenge each other to see who could get the highest score, and we shared our progress with each other all along the way. I didn’t know it at the time, but I’m sure now that playing that game was what caused me to really love math. What I also didn’t know was that I was learning a lot by playing that game. It was so engaging and challenging that it didn’t feel like work at all!
I often wonder what would have happened in my 2nd grade class if I had had a reading game I loved as much as I loved Number Munchers.
Pocket Tales is the game I wished I’d had when I was younger. We created it because we wanted to turn reading into a game we’d love to play and share with our friends.
Reading is more fun (and educational) with friends.
The best part of books is when we can share what we are reading with each other. Although we all read books on our own, the best way to learn from reading is when we can discuss with others what’s happening in books. Our friends might have uncovered a clue or noticed something really interesting that we might not have noticed reading it on our own. Isn’t it fun to hear what your friends thought about the crazy adventures Geronimo Stilton went on or why he climbed Mount Kilimanjaro? Me too! Reading is fun when you share all the interesting facts you learned from those books with your friends.
We want to help you find great books.
I said earlier that one of the biggest reasons I didn’t read lots of books when I was young was because I couldn’t find books that I liked. I wasn’t alone, it happens to a lot of kids. In fact, the top three reasons that kids don’t read more books are because:
- They have too much schoolwork or homework. Uh oh, we can’t help you there, better file a complaint with Mr. Hancock.
- They would rather do other things. Well, maybe playing the Pocket Tales game will be so fun that you won’t want to do all that other crummy stuff, like chores or laundry, ha ha!
- And lastly, they can’t find books that they like. Yes, we know! We can help!
I know the books I really liked were the ones I picked out on my own or the ones my closest friends were reading. By letting kids recommend books to their friends, we hope to be a powerful recommendation engine that helps kids discover books that they will actually LIKE to read.
Games are the best!
Lastly, every great game keeps score, right? Well, at Pocket Tales we aren’t worried so much about score. We turned reading into a game because games give you a fun way to engage with your favorite books on a deeper level, and that’s really important to us. Engagement in reading is one of the best ways that have been found to help kids learn and succeed with reading. We hope that if we can help you find books you like while also helping you learn something from every book you read, you’ll become a better reader and develop a lifelong love for reading.
With Pocket Tales, our goals are simple: 1) to encourage you to read more often by making reading as fun as possible, 2) to help you find more books that you’ll love to read, and 3) to help you get more education, entertainment and engagement out of every single book you read.
We hope you have as much fun playing Pocket Tales as we have had making it for you!
—
Yaw AningChief Executive Officer
Pocket Tales | Adventures in Reading
