Oops

For families with students in the blue group, there was an error on the January calendar. As you are aware, the students rotate back and forth between English and French on day 5s. The calendar should have read:

*Thursday, Jan. 14-French

*Thursday, Jan. 21-English 

*Friday, Jan. 29-French

My apologies for the error.

Meaningful Play

Today, some of the students began building long stacks using toys called linking (or unifix) cubes. Eventually, they used the entire bin and had made a line across the length of the classroom, from one table to another. It was fascinating to watch the students build, noticing that their structure would fall without support. 

They began using chairs as support, but noticed that their line of cubes still sagged. Some students tried unsuccessfully to build vertical supports for this cube line. I overheard one student explain the cubes sagged since not all chairs were the same height, and the shorter chair backs made it less secure. 

Once they had used all the cubes, and could not make it any longer, we encouraged them to measure it. We gave them measuring tapes, and with some cooperation and teacher assistance, they discovered it was 703 cm long (not 703 km long as some proclaimed!!!😀)

Measuring gave one student the idea that he wanted to make his own measuring tape. He quickly went to work, cut a painting paper into strips and began putting on the numbers. He finally decided that writing these numbers was going to be a lot of work...he was going to take it home to complete at his leisure!

Madame Behnke came in to admire our creation, and posed the question"I wonder how many cubes you used?". This sent us on our next daunting adventure! With some prompting, the students realized that they could count the cubes to 10, then mark the ten as a tally mark, then we counted all the tally marks. 

We discovered that we had used 380 cubes in all!

What a simple, yet amazing learning experience that encompassed our entire morning and included many learners!

Outdoor time

With the milder weather later this week, we have enjoyed some outdoor time. There is nothing better than the simple pleasure of enjoying the great outdoors. We enjoyed jumping on and off of snow banks and tobogganing down Stonecrest's own sledding hill.

Their words:"I am all out of batteries!"😀

Spinning!

To elicit some interest, we have set out a variety of spinning tops. This has provided hours of fun, excitement, predictions, trial and error play, speculation (which one spins best, which one spins longest, etc). If you have any spinning tops that you are no longer be played with, we would be happy to put them to good use! Next, we will add a variety of timers and see if they wish to time their experiments.

It's all in a name!

Each morning when your child enters either the French of English classroom, he or she "signs in". This exercise provides a meaningful opportunity to practice writing his or her name correctly ( upper case first, followed but lower case letters) and neatly. It also allows the teachers to quickly see who is present and absent. In the near future, your child will be asked to locate and sign in using their last name only. If your child is not familiar with reading and writing his of her own surname, you may wish to take a few minutes to familiarize them with their last name. Your child will always be given a model to copy from if needed. 

Making (and measuring) Snowman

After reading "Sadie and the Snowman", each student got to design and make his of her own snowman by shaping and cutting a small, medium and large circle. Then, everyone decorated their snowman by cutting out and gluing on their own "accessories". Once completed, each student had to measure their snowman using blocks as a non-standard unit of measure and record the number of blocks used.

Happy New Year

We hope everyone had an enjoyable holiday. All the best for a wonderful, happy, and healthy 2016. We noticed an unusually high number of superheroes in class today. We thought we'd share our photo.