Rocking in My School Shoes!

Do you know Pete the Cat? Pete is one cool cat. He is the main character in the very popular books written by Eric Litwin and illustrated by Kimberly and James Dean.

We love Pete the Cat because he loves to groove and never loses his cool. In one of the books, Pete’s white shoes are constantly changing colours as he accidentally steps in one thing after another, but does Pete get upset? “Goodness no.”

We love Pete so much, we made Pete’s of our own!

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First Day of School

We had a wonderful first day of school in K/1/2/3. We began our morning with a familiar fairytale retold by author Jan Brett and then we went on a Bear Hunt. Be sure to ask your child what their favourite part of the story was and go on a Bear Hunt of your own!
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Next we made self portraits to add to our coconut tree in the hallway. Chicka Chicka Boom Boom, look who’s in our classroom!

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After a tour around the school we finished our first day with a game of Hands Up tag and Go Go Go Stop in the gym. Our K/1/2/3s are amazing at freezing like statues!

We can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings!

Our Mural

Claudia is working with all the students in the school to paint a beautiful mural. The students planned the design and have been working on it any time the weather cooperates. Take a look at the progress so far!

We would like to thank the community for all the paint that has been donated. We can’t wait to see the finished mural!

Watch Out Wallace and Gromit!

The next claymation movie makers may just be in our class! Today during tech time the K/1/2/3s began work on their stop motion animation projects. We learned about an app called iStopMotion and tried out some simple animations using plasticine. The students learned that you need to make small movements so that your video will look smooth and that it is very important to keep the camera still. This week was a time to practice and experiment. Next week we will begin work on our masterpieces!

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Dream Houses

If you could build a house anywhere in the world and money was no object what would you build? This is the question the students answered last week when they imagined their dream houses.

We started by looking at Mrs. Watson’s pins of dream houses on Pinterest. Next we brainstormed locations and the different rooms we might want to include in our own houses. We had a chance to talk about our ideas with a friend and then we set off to make a plan. On our plans we tried to add specific details that would make our writing interesting.

The next day, we started to write. We were trying to focus on using descriptive language and on adding sensory details. We wanted to make our readers feel like they were walking through our houses on a tour.

Finally we drew pictures to go along with our writing. Here are the pictures we drew:


 

You will be able to find our stories in this month’s AJ Eagle and on our individual blogs shortly.

Where would you build your dream house?

What would it look like?

Would there be any special rooms you would be sure to include?

Welcome All Birds!

On Friday we finished our birdhouses. On the first day we sketched our houses after looking at several examples on the internet. The following week we painted them using tempera paints. We practised mixing colours and techniques like double loading our paint brushes. On the final day we outlined our birdhouses with permanent markers, added a wash for the background, and made our birds using painted paper and scrapbook paper. We love how they turned out and hope you do too!


The idea for this lesson came from Deep Space Sparkle (a fantastic art blog).

Cedar Weaving with Claudia

Today during First Nations time we learned how to weave with cedar. We learned that the cedar strips came from the bark of the cedar tree. Claudia had to cut the pieces of bark into strips and then split them so they were thin enough. The cedar strips were soaked in water so that they would be more flexible for weaving.

We worked with a partner so that one person could hold the strips still while the other person did the weaving.

Teagan-It looks really hard, but it’s actually not that hard.
Brooklynn-It was hard to push the strips up.
Lily-It was really fun and I had a great time. I thought it would be really hard because I hadn’t done it before.
Koa-After we did the weaving it looked really cool.
Taegan-It didn’t really look hard, but it was hard.
May-It was very fun to do it, even though one of mine kept falling off.
Jorja-I had a great time, but asked Claudia for help and found out I had 2 “unders”.
Kezra-I thought mine wouldn’t look good, but then it did.

Have you ever tried weaving?

Let it Snow!

It is almost the end of January and we still haven’t had any snow to play in. If it isn’t going to snow for real, we can at least pretend!

Happy Snowmen

Our snowmen certainly have a lot of personality!

This art lesson can be found at deepspacesparkle.com.