A cow comes to school!!!!!!

What an "udder-ly" wonderful afternoon we had! We had a visit from the dairy educator. She spoke about the qualities of milk, it's nutritional value and all the dairy products we consume.

Her cow "Marmalade"!

Doing the milk shake dance.

Feeling what it would be like to be milked!

To enhance the experience, Mrs. Eastman brought in a 2 month old Holstein calf. We all got to touch and pet the young calf.

A few pics from Spirit Week

Just thought that we'd share some of the pictures from last week's Spirit week.

Crazy hair/crazy hat day!

Plaid day

PJ day

Sports day

Blue and green day (Earth day)

As a finale to our week, it was so great to see so many of our families at Stonecrest's dance Friday night!

We've got the whole world in our hands!

Happy Earth Day! We completed our beautiful earth day pictures today. We read a book about cleaning up our green spaces, then went outdoors to clean up the garbage.

Yaki visit

Yaki visited Stonecrest today. What a high energy, fun,energetic and silly show! The kids thoroughly enjoyed the singing and antics. 

Basket Raffle

 Thank you so much to those of you who have donated a variety of items for our SK Basket Raffle-a craft theme. It looks great and is ready for auction at the dance Friday night. Students will be able to buy tickets for the Basket Raffle Friday at school. Tickets will cost $1.00 each. We have over 15 themed baskets for them to have a chance to win. Tickets will also be sold at the Family Dance Friday evening. Winners will be drawn and notified at the end of the Family Dance. If winners are not at the Family Dance, they will be notified and can get their basket Monday at school. Thank you for supporting this Stonecrest fundraiser. Hope to see you at the dance!

Character day-Wednesday

Anyone who knows me well, knows how much I dislike coming to school in my pyjamas! Despite my efforts to change their mind, the blue group decided that our free choice day...Wednesday of this week, we should come to school in our pyjamas, carrying our stuffies!

 

The Art Gallery

We have been exploring a variety of different famous artists and styles in both classes. Accordingly, we have changed up our dramatic arts centre to an Aet Gallery. There are a variety of artists works depicted, as well an opportunity for the students to create, name and price their own masterpieces! 

This will fit well with our upcoming field trip to the National Gallery of Canada. Mark it on you calendar for May 25th. More details will be sent home shortly. 

A focus on writing

This is such an exciting time of year, as students begin using their understanding of letter sounds and words they know to write simple messages. In both the English and French class, we are focussing on some of the little techniques that make the writing read-able. So, we have started talking about how we use sentences (not just 1 or 2 word labels), we put spaces between the words, we use periods at the end of our sentence, words are written left to right, in a line and letters are formed using lower case letters. This is a lot to focus on, so we are doing some mini lessons. Today, the students used linking blocks to count and represent the number of words in a sentence. 

Christopher showing : "the cat is black"

I showed the a sentence with all the letters jammed together, no spaces between the words, and asked the to represent the sentence in blocks.

Of course, they used one block, but then when I read the sentence, they realized it was 4 blocks. They soon realized that the sentence required spaces between the words.  They were then given a squished sentence along with the book that the sentence had come from. 

The students then had to re write the sentence appropriately with spaces.

Spirit week...next week!

Please encourage your child to participate in Stonecrest's spirit week next week. The dates and themes are as follows:

Monday, April 18-Crazy hat or crazy hair day

Tuesday, April 19-plaid or tie day

Wednesday, April 20-class choice day (we'll discuss, decide and let you know)

Thursday, April 21-sports day

Friday, April 22-Earth day colours (blue and green)

Is spring really here?

Now that some nice weather has arrived, we took the opportunity to take everyone outside for some nature exploration. We were trying to look and listen for signs of spring.

A little bit of green...

Who lives here?

We talked a bit about the motto "Take only pictures, leave only footprints", as many of our friends think that they want to remove sticks and rocks to take home!

A Lot of Dots

After reading a bunch of books that are predominately about dots....

We've begun talking about dots, drawing dots,....

Even writing books about dots!

Today, we read a story that featured the artwork of Georges Seurat.

 He was a seventeenth century French artist who used individual dots to create the scenes in paintings. This method is known as pointillism. We have begun our own version of Seurat's masterpiece: "The Seine and la Grande Jatte " using a similar technique.