Christmas 2014

We preformed two songs for this year's Christmas Concert: What Are You Doing New Year's Eve and Hotel Yorba. We also made the greatest Christmas poster that has ever existed (Jordan's grade 2 class made a close second) and built a successful Santa trap.

2B's Christmas Poster

The Best!

Our students needed to put several smaller boxes together to make a big enough Santa trap.

Hard at work.

We hung the box from the ceiling using a pulley and questionable ladder safety.

Some were more helpful than others.

It got very cold in the last few weeks of school, and indoor recess can be really boring. To solve this problem we managed to get a ping-pong table a few times to hold a Tournament Magnifico!

Santa is coming get ready!

He's coming!

Don't worry, we freed Santa so you'll all get your presents tomorrow.

Merry Christmas!

Festival For The Arts

Grade 4 Painting

I was able, using my brilliance, to secure some funding for our school through MFNERC to put on a art festival. While it was unfortunate that the festival had to take place before the end of the year (Christmas takes over once November ends) it was still a great opportunity to showcase student work which normally doesn't see the outside of the classroom.

Checking out the Grade 2 and Grade 4 artwork

Grade 5 Digaramas

The only space large enough to put up all this art is the gym, so that meant we could only have the event run one day. We had a poor parent turnout (there was recently a death in the community), but those who did come enjoyed themselves.

Grade 6 Tioramas

Grade 5 Optical Illusions and Weaving

Grade 6 Relief Prints (our class)

Grade 5 Drawing

Grade 6 Story Wheels

Grade 4 Book Work

Grade 2 Dot Painting

Grade 6 Monster Masks (our class)

While I didn't get work from every class, the work I did get was excellent. A few classes, including our own, also performed songs and poems. Usually when we have school concerts it's only the parents who are invited to watch. This is a real shame and we wanted to give teachers the option to have their students enjoy the performances as well. 

Our classes performed "Stubborn Love" by the Lumineers, "Little Ghost" by the White Stripes, and "Rude" by Magic. While they were a bit nervous, they did really well. Alex and I are very proud of all of their hard work.

Ink Troubles and Bug Bags

Only three more weeks of school! With report cards and parent-teacher day behind us, Alex and I are counting down the days we have left before we go home for the holidays. Korra will be staying at a kennel in Winnipeg this year. She'll have Ollie to play with the entire time, so I don't feel too bad about leaving her for three weeks.

Alex has the kids working on classification in science. When Alex handed out the bags of toy bugs he suggested that they held live insects. He assures me their reactions were priceless.

 

In art we're working on relief printing. The ink I was able to get through the school is pretty terrible, and it will wreck the poly-blocks if we're not careful. This meant that I ended up having to ink up most of the blocks myself. Still, everyone got to print their image at least three times so I'll call it a win.

Next Friday we will be displaying our prints as well as performing three songs at our school's first ever Art Festival. 

November Is Almost Over!

November is flying by. Report cards go out next week and after that Christmas takes over until we go home for the holidays. Somehow we manage to find time to take Korra out for walks to the park (aka the playground). There are always other dogs around for her to play with so it makes getting enough exercise pretty easy.

This puppy was recently flown out to Winnipeg to be taken in by Manitoba Mutts. They foster dogs until they are able to find them good homes. I really liked this puppy (she reminded me of Korra for obvious reasons), so I'm glad she's on her way to finding the perfect family.

Ender and I did the Blanket Exercise with our classes  a few weeks ago. The activity uses blankets to represent the land we now call Canada and students played the part of the indigenous cultures and nations who live on those lands. The exercise goes through the history of treaty-making, colonization and resistance that resulted in the Canada we know today.

At first the blankets cover the whole floor, and students can walk or sit where they like. They can only stand on the blankets and not the floor, but that's not really a problem because the blankets cover the entire floor.

By the time we finish the remaining students (those who did not 'die' because of disease, relocation, or abuse) were confined to blankets just large enough to stand on (reserves). It's a really good activity though it needs some modification for younger, less patient students.

Our Reading Workshop has been going really well. Students are learning how to choose books and many of them are feeling motivated to actually finish them. Right now the Amulet series by Kazu Kibuishi is really popular.

And to finish things off we had our Bazaar of the year last night. Enjoy the face-painting photos.

0