Monthly Archives: December 2014

December 31, 2014 · 1:16 pm

Santa and the Polar Express Day Fun!

We had a great time on our Polar Express Day! The day started off with a special visit from Santa!

We had a great visit together! He wanted to hear the song we did for the Christmas concert!

We gave him one of our guitars and we sang the North Pole Rock and Roll song together! Lots of fun!

The other Grade One class joined us aboard the Polar Express with some very special Polar Express tickets! We had a great time together. We had hot chocolate with mini marshmallows and lots of amazing treats just like on the Polar Express. Thank you to all the parents who helped supply all the goodies this time! The two groups gathered on the carpet to watch the movie The Polar Express in the afternoon. It was a real treat to see it on our new Promethean board!

Here is a picture of the very important mail we received from the North Pole! Our buddies helped us write letters to Santa and our replies came to the school! Very exciting!

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December 30, 2014 · 7:06 pm

Fun with Glitter and the Polar Express!

We had a lot of fun creating our entry to the Christmas Door Decorating contest! We made our own Polar Express! The children colored their own boxcar for the train. We love The Polar Express story written by Chris Van Allsburg.

We added white glue to the rooftops of the boxcar and sprinkled white glitter on top. Lots of fun! The children added a photograph of themselves in one of the boxcar windows.

We decided to paint the railroad tracks using black paint. One of our rainy day classroom supervisors helped us finish the job!

We love using glitter and made our Christmas light houses using white glue and red glitter. The children drew little vignettes of the inside of their houses in the windows. We also included another photograph of them in one of the windows!

We will be using these houses as a special cover for a book we created about Christmas and the five senses.

Take a peek!

Glitter is a lot of fun!

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Tagged as christmas, Christmas Houses, Polar Express

December 30, 2014 · 7:05 pm

More Hour of Code Fun with Elsa!

We have continued to learn about coding with the Hour of Code designed for this year! This is a great set of lessons about coding with Elsa from the Frozen movie. The students learned how to make Elsa make a snowflake design on the ice using coding. By putting a set of commands using Blockly the students made Elsa move on the ice.

We are so lucky because we can show this on our wonderful Promethean board so that everyone can see it clearly. The best part is that the students can come up to the board and move the pieces around themselves. You can bet that I have a lot of volunteers for that job!

We have also returned to the computer lab and worked on the Angry Birds Hour of Code and had a lot of fun trying to complete the Hour of Code by ourselves with just a little help from some wonderful students in our Grade Seven class who helped the students log on. It was really neat to see everyone helping each other out whenever someone got stumped!

It was really neat to see other classes in our school also try the Hour of Code. I think we had five classes at our school take part!

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December 8, 2014 · 10:45 pm

Hour of Code Fun!

Today we participated in the Hour of Code! This week is Hour of Code week around the world. The intent of the Hour of Code is to introduce the basics of coding in computer science. The students work through a set of lessons and learn the basics of coding. And it’s fun! Classes from around the world are signing on to learn to code. There are currently Hour of Code 77,189 events scheduled this week and we were one of them. If you look at the map on the Hour of Code website and zoom into Vancouver Island, you will find our school! We are one of 1853 events in Canada! Very cool!

Our big buddy class helped us take part in this event! They were absolutely awesome! We had a few glitches along the way because so many people in the world were working on the Hour of Code at the same time. That meant that sometimes it took a long time to sign on, or the program froze, or did a little hiccup. Considering how many students were signed on to the site around the world we did very well. I was super excited that we managed to get so many students signed on! The students were very patient and handled it very well. We used a combination of computers in the lab, the iPads, and the Promethean Board in our classroom to get as many students on the site as we could. Many students made it through a lot of the lessons. You can see from the pictures that everyone was really focused! Please take a moment and take a look at the tutorials that are available for the children to try. The tutorials are up on the site year round. We did the Angry Birds one. There is a new one with Elsa from the movie Frozen. It is a bit more difficult.

I tried out the tutorials a couple of weekends ago and got really hooked. I ended up staying up really late trying them! Lots of fun! They have added some new things to the Angry Bird tutorial this week so I will have to try it again!

There are lots of lessons and tutorials that we will be trying out. I have also found some simple coding apps that we will be introducing soon. This is going to be way too much fun!

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December 7, 2014 · 10:22 pm

Christmas Fun!

We have been having a great time making Christmas cards to send to 30 other classrooms from around the world. We are taking part in the Holiday Card Exchange with over 1,100 other classes in the world. This project is organized by a lovely lady in California named Jennifer Wagner. We have to make 30 cards and send them to the 30 names on our list. We will be receiving cards back from all the names on our list! We took part in this project last year and it was very exciting. This year we have cards going to Kenya, New Zealand, and Japan. We have cards going to five places in Canada, and lots of cards going to a large variety of places in the United States!

Sparkles, our Elf on the Shelf is back this year and started her visit with a snowball fight with the dinosaurs in the classroom. The snowballs were miniature marshmallows! Of course,we had to eat up the marshmallows to prevent further fights.

She has been leaving treats for the children each day!

Sinterclaas paid a visit too!

We are starting a new type of Brown Bag sharing over the next few weeks. We will be sharing our favorite Christmas customs. My family celebrates Sinterclass. I brought my wooden shoes to school and taught the children a few words in Dutch. That was enough to have our classroom become honorary Dutch citizens for the day and Sinterclaas paid a surprise visit! He left some Dutch gingerbread, chocolate coins, pencils, and chocolate letters. Very yummy!

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December 7, 2014 · 9:48 pm

Fun with Words!

We have been having fun making sentences! The children love making sentences on the Promethean Board.

Thank you to everyone who sent me their sentences using the word banks that were sent home! The pictures are awesome and the sentences are fantastic!

Here are just a few samples! I have a lot more and will post them over the next little while!

This is a neat idea from Evan’s family that I have to share! They made flashcards of all the Pre-Primer Dolch words and put them on his bedroom ceiling. Then Evan used his flashlight to find words to read! Too much fun! I think I will try it with our next word list in the classroom!

We have been working with a variety of word recognition apps in the classroom. One of my favorites is Montesorri Words. T

The children have to spell the word to match the picture by dragging the appropriate letters to fill the boxes. It has several levels of difficulty ranging from simple three and four letter words to more complicated crossword puzzles. The children really like it because it rewards each correct answer with a fun page that lets them move a variety of images around the screen.

The other word recognition app we have been using a lot is Word Bingo.

This is a great little app that lets the children practice the Dolch word lists. There is a bingo component and a spelling component.

You can also find this game on the ABC Ya! site. We have a link to the game on our classroom WIKI!

We have been working on learning to print our numbers and letters correctly. Guess what! There is an app for that! My favorite one is called Letter School. This is a very popular app. The animations are amazing. My favorite one is the lawnmower!

It is fun to listen to the children giggle at the animations. It is really fun when I attach the iPad to our Promethean board! They love the one with the fuse! It looks like it blows up and shakes the whole screen. Learning how to print can be lots of fun!

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Tagged as Letter School, montesorri words, word banks, word bingo