Happy Valentine's Day!

How much excitement can we pack into one week?  We were pretty happy to be celebrating Valentine's Day, for sure.  The students have been busy making Valentines for their friends and have had lots of fun delivering them.  Along with exchanging cards, we brought in a sweet or salty treat to add to a special Snack Mix.  First we graphed what we brought with our giant ten frames.  

Then we added our treats to the Sweet or Salty bowl.  One person brought kettle corn and we decided it needed to go in both mixes!  Fun!  Before eating our treats, we recorded the information on our own graphs and shared three important facts that the graphs told us.  Some of our findings were:

*  There were more sweet than salty.

* Salty has half of sweet.  Like it would take two saltys to make a sweet.

* 6+6=12  That means sweet has double.

* 6+12=18  18 people brought snakes (snacks, I hope!).

Finally we got to open our Valentine mail!  We LOVED reading our cards!  Thank you families for helping the kids create such special memories...

One student brought Valentines that were animal glasses.  We all got into character and had so much fun being animals.  Here are the lizards!  (Thanks Trevor for taking the picture!)

Ah, Valentine's Day...  Hope you all enjoyed opening up the candy at home!!!

Olympic Excitement

Olympic excitement is well underway at our school, and we kicked it all off with an Olympic Assembly (that turned into an Olympic Parade and Announcements due to a gym problem!).  Every class in the school was assigned a country and a sport to share information about, and our division researched Great Britain and Curling.  We had two eager students report out the important facts for each and we were so proud of their courage and speaking voices!

Since then, we've been enjoying hearing Olympic updates twice a day and Olympic Stations in the (now fixed) Gym.  The students are LOVING living the Olympic athlete dream as they participate in:

Downhill Skiing

Speed Skating

Snowboarding

Curling, and more!

We decided we needed to choose a Winter Olympic Sport that we would like to do and show what we'd look like!  Here is Team Canada 2026:

Happy 100th Day of School!

Congratulations on the 100th Day of School this year everyone!  We are feeling pretty proud of all of the amazing things we've learned so far this year and celebrated with an afternoon of activities.  Our favourite activity was definitely "cupcake complements".  Trevor's Mom put her talents to work again and designed some incredible numbered cupcakes.  When we came to this station, we pulled a numbered ticket out of a bag and had to search for the cupcake that would add together to make one hundred!

We also compared the weight of our collections with our friends' collections.  Some of us had fun combining collections to see what would happen to the balance scales.  It was fun to make predictions and there were definitely some surprises... especially with lighter objects.  Hmmm...  we'll have to explore this more!

We loved counting our collections in different ways, and some of us buddied up and each put an object in the boxes on the hundred grids to double 100!

We hope you've had a terrific first 100 Days of School too!  Let us know how you celebrated this milestone!

National Family Literacy Day

We celebrated National Family Literacy Day in our classroom on Monday, January 27.  We invited our families to join us at the beginning of our day and participate in special activities.  We did a non-fiction scavenger hunt, compared our hands to a gorilla's in the book Actual Size, played games, and thought about literacy in our own homes.  We had moms, dads, brothers, sisters, grandmas, and grandpas join us and we loved sharing this time together!

Here we are spinning spinners to help us talk about fiction before, during, and after reading.

Family Games are full of reading, writing, and speaking!  What are your favourite games to play?

We shared some really special thoughts about how literacy in our homes looks like, sounds like, and feels like.

We loved asking questions while playing Headbanz!

We were lucky to wrap up the day with Flashlight Reading with our Big Buddies in the gym.  It was a peaceful feeling to cozy up with our favourite books and friends!  Happy National Family Literacy Day everyone!

Counting to Christmas

Excitement about Christmas is starting to build in our classroom, and we decided to put some Christmas Countdowns together!  We read a beautiful story called:  Counting to Christmas by Nancy Tafuri and talked about the ways we prepare for the holiday season.  Then we each drew our own Santas and added 24 number stories that we'll be solving as we count our way to Christmas.

We each chose our own set of "just right" number stories, and we'll be adding a cotton ball each day to the one that is equal to the date.  We'll have to be great detectives and problem solvers!  

What are you doing to Count to Christmas?

Reindeer Games!

It may still be November, but it's never to early to enjoy the Reindeer Games!  This week we had a great time warming up with the Reindeer Pokey, and then jumped right into Blitzen's Ball Bounce, Snowball Throwing, Loading the Sleigh, Balancing Hot Chocolate Trays, and our favorite:  Reindeer Take-Off Practice!  We are wondering if any other classes out there like to have fun with seasonal games in the gym...

Sharpening Our Senses at Redwood Park

This week we were "Sharpening Our Senses" with our Grade 5 Buddies at a favorite local treasure:  Redwood Park.  Through our MindUp activities, we have been learning about experiencing our surroundings through mindful seeing, listening, smelling, and feeling.  (We decided to leave mindful tasting out of this fieldtrip!)  We spent time walking through the park, making observations and recording them.  It was easy to focus our attention and avoid distractions with so many natural wonders to take in!

From salamanders to seed pods, we all agreed that it was a wonderful experience noticing all that nature has to offer!  Thanks again to our Big Buddies, Mrs. Booth, Ms. Kennedy, and all of our Parent Helpers!