Monthly Archives: January 2015

January 28, 2015 · 9:33 pm

Fun with Penguins!

We have started our unit on Penguins!

We have penguins everywhere!

Over the last few weeks we have watched the penguins on the live webcam at the Vancouver Aquarium. Very cool! The penguins here are watching their keeper clean up their enclosure. He even reached down to pet one of the little penguins. Very cute! You can find the link to the webcam here.

We also watched bit of the webcam from Seaworld in Orlando. You can find the link for this webcam here. These guys are really noisy!

We read some non-fiction books about penguins! We learned a lot of interesting facts. Did you know that penguins like to surf?

Then we did a penguin research report. First, we read the facts and decided which category would be the best for each fact. Our four categories were: What They Look Like, What They Eat, About the Babies, and Cool Facts! Then we coded the facts with the beginning letter for each category and the children glued the facts to the corresponding page.

We turned our report into a penguin!

We have also created a QR code for the Vancouver Aquarium webcam that we have attached to our penguin reports.

If you have a QR code reader on your phone come on in and try it out! It’s a lot of fun!

It seems a bit like magic to point the iPad at a little box and have penguins appear! Too much fun!

We’ve Got Mail Fun

We have had a great time taking part in the Holiday Card Exchange this year! I signed our class up to take part in a Global Christmas Card exchange this year! This card exchange is coordinated by Jennifer Wagner. Over 1000 teachers worldwide took part this year! We were responsible for sending out 32 cards to different schools in the world. Each of the schools in our group was responsible for sending us a card back! The theme for the cards this year was Lights. We sent off our cards in the early part of December and started receiving cards during the last week of school before the holiday break. We received the rest of the cards after Christmas.

We sent cards to faraway places like New Zealand, Japan, and Kenya! We sent cards to other parts of Canada such as Newfoundland and Ontario. We sent many cards to schools all over the United States. And we got some wonderful cards back. Some of the cards had pictures of the classes, or letters from the student who made the card.

I bought a map of the world and we displayed our mail and where it came from! You can see our mail on the display board outside of the gym. We also used Google Maps on our Promethean Board to figure out where each of our cards came from and how far away the school was from us! Using the Promethean board was awesome because I could zero in on a location of a swipe of my fingers. Very cool.

As part of the project we had to include an information page about our school. We had to include what the average temperature would be in December, how many boys and girls were in our classes, and what we liked about our school. We found out some very interesting things. The fact that the children were most interested in was how many boys or girls were in the classes!

This picture show some of our mail on one day! Very exciting to get mail just for us! The stamps were very pretty too!

This is a closeup of the letter from Nairobi, Kenya. We learned a lot from this letter.

We learned a lot about different schools around the world and how big the world is! We also learned how much fun it is to get mail! I think we are all a little sad that this project is done. We liked getting Christmas cards!

We hope they liked our cards too!

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Filed under Christmas Card Project, Promethean Board

Tagged as Christmas Card Project, Projects by Jen, Promethean Board

January 4, 2015 · 1:57 pm

Fun with The Elves!

Sparkles, our Elf on the Shelf and Gus, our resident ghost and trickster have been leaving surprises all month. I decided to try to catch them in the act with the Santa Spy Cam app. We caught Sparkles’ friends in the act! You can see our classroom in the video! They left us a note! Too much fun! The Santa Spy Cam app is really cool. Take a look at this app at the app store or online and see the amazing things that are possible with this app!

Here are a few of the treats left for us each day!

The students seemed to really enjoy the visit from Sparkles and rushed to find out what she had left for us each day! We will miss her!

Gingerbread Man Fun!

We had a great time chasing this guy all around the school! He led us on a merry chase all around the school. First, we read the story about the Gingerbread Man. I had made a this big guy at home and brought him to school to decorate and bake. When we went to take him out of the oven he had run away. He left us a clue written on a gingerbread man shape in the kitchen. That led us to the office and classrooms all around the school. The students had a great time locating all the clues hidden in the classrooms! He finally ended up back in our classroom on my rolling chair!