Busy

A lot has been happening here these past two months. The school science fair is just a week and a half away, and our students are hard at work preparing their projects. We didn't have a science fair last year because of the school cancellations in January, so our students don't have the experience of grade 5 to fall back on. Working so independently is a new expectation and many of them had difficulties selecting projects and setting their own research goals. 

We seem to be getting the hang of things now. There are a few projects that stand a good chance at being selected for the Winnipeg science fair in March, and this year we are able to take 8 students! Front runners include building a simple robot and re-inventing the battery.

Our school was selected to participate in the Provincial Festival for the Arts in Winnipeg next week. I am able to take 12 students and 3 teachers to represent our school. The trip is next week and we've been scrambling to raise additional funds and plan. The trip will be similar to the science fair so I'll be taking two very similar trips to Winnipeg only weeks apart. It's a great opportunity but it's left me little time to think about much else.

Recently we've met some of the new nurses and have been spending time with them. It's funny that it's taken us over 2 years to talk to any of the nurses (they only live a 10 minute walk away) but I guess better late than never.

Ender and I often bring both classes together in either my room or his to do combined lessons. A few weeks ago after one of these combined lessons my students and I came back to our room find that a puppy had sneaked in and was taking a nap in the book nook. We have no idea how it got into the school, but one of my students thought it looked like her cousin's puppy and took it home with her. 

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.