Classroom Promise

Maker buddies - Build a Snowman & writing!

Today, our 'Maker buddies' came buy to guide us through using our Chromebooks to first build a Snowman. The students had a great time using their imaginations to style their Snowman to their individual liking. Afterwards, in collaboration with our buddies & teachers the grade one's wrote a couple sentences about what their Snowman looked like.

50's day FUN!

Yesterday, we celebrated 50 DAYS of being in school! We celebrated in many ways: We blew bubbles and tallied how many times we could blow bubbles, listened to a presentation on the culture of the 50's 'Now and Then', worked with numbers up to 50, danced our hearts out at a SOCK HOP AND made our own ROOT BEER FLOATS! We also did a 'How To' writing activity on how to make Root Beer Floats. It was a lot easier to do the writing activity because we built up our Schema by making and drinking the floats. If only writing always tasted this good...

Happy Mustache day!

November is a great time to wear a Mustache. I am pretty sure the look is not my best, but fun is! My grade one's were so excited to see myself and Mrs. Knight sporting a fuzzy upper lip! Today is our school-wide spirit day - Mustache day!

Humility - Showing Humility during Anti-Bullying week (Nov. 12-18th, 2017) as a way of being Proactive!

As a Grade one group, we each took one of the 7 sacred teachings to focus on for our school wide 'Proactive week' in support of Anti-bullying. Our class was given the Wolf who teaches us about Humility. The expression of this humility is done through the consideration of others before ourselves. The other animals and their teachings were: The Eagle - love, Buffalo - respect, Bear - courage, Sabe - honesty, Beaver - wisdom, and Turtle - truth.

We can BE PROACTIVE by using HUMILITY to think win-win, not bragging and being proud of everyone around us!

We are a 7 Habits School!

During our Health lessons' we are working our way through the 7 Habits. See below link for all the 7 Habits & videos.

Classroom Promise

Each year, together with my grade one's we create our 'Classroom Promise'. Firstly, we always discuss:

1. Our right to be safe.
2. Our right to learn.
3. Our right to be happy.

There is a lot of discussion and action that goes into creating our classroom culture. This is just our start...I love their creativity!

Conflict vs. Bullying

“Increasingly, evidence shows that healthy relationships are much more effective at ending bullying than anti-bullying rules and punishment. Components of healthy relationships include trust, respect, fairness, equality, stability, enjoyment, contentment, and belonging. When kids respect each other, and have a personal connection to their classmates – even something as small as knowing their names –  they are much less likely to purposefully hurt them. Healthy relationships are also proven to increase our resilience, self-confidence, pro-social skills, stress management, and overall well-being, so that even if kids experience bullying, healthy relationships better prepare them to cope, and ensure that they have a support network of trusted peers and adults to help them navigate the situation..”

From: http://safeandcaring.ca/3337/community-what-it-means-to-wear-pink-on-pink-shirt-day/

7 Habits

H5 – Seek First to Understand & Then Be Understood:

Develops respect, empathy & tolerance

A resolution model that helps students resolve conflicts using the Talking Stick.

Happy Mustache day!

Today is 'Mustache day'! Happy school spirit day! Happy Friday!

Kapla Blocks

Working together to build towers as high to build as high as we can...

50 days of school

Yes, it is true...we are 50 DAYS SMARTER!!! Today, we celebrate by dressing in 50's style, we watched a presentation on what it was like back in the 50's, we attended a 'Sock hop' and danced 50's style and capped the day off by making Root beer floats!!! 

We also:

• Wrote a 'How to' make Root beer floats.
• Counted our way through to 50 (tallies, skip counting, odd/even #'s, etc)

It was a SUPER fun day!

Belonging in my world

I can identify the different types of communities or groups I belong to.

Habit 1 - Be Proactive

How to be Proactive?

Watch this video. In the end of this clip Franklin has a problem. What could he have done to show he was Proactive? What could he have done differently? How would a proactive decision changed the end result?

How can you change the world? What do you think is the best way to make changes?

How could YOU be a good citizen by using Habit #1 - Be Proactive? Please comment!

All About Pumpkins!

This week we researched Pumpkins!!! We learned about all the parts of the pumpkin, the life cycle and lots of cool facts. My new learning was that a white pumpkin is called 'albino' and that pumpkins are made up of 90% water. I never new that before. Today, we investigated what was inside the pumpkin. Then, went to the kitchen to roast our seeds. Ask us if we liked how they tasted. 

The results: 4 - not so much & 12 - yummy!

4+12=16 students that know a lot about Pumpkins!

#GlobalMakerDay 2016 1T and 3J

Check out our video that was made doing a Google hangout between Ms. J's grade 3's and my grade 1's. We both signed up to be a part of the Global Maker Day that happened around the world. We chose to do the cardboard & inspirational world challenge. My favorite part of the 'Tinkering time' is when us teachers essentially get pushed out of the way and they have the creative freedom to INVENT!!! There is no right or wrong here...Check out the happy kids in this video!! "Let's get mak'n!"
Thank you to Ms. J and her fine talents putting this video together :)

#GlobalMakersDay

October, 25th is Global Maker's Day in which many people around the world are participating in 'Making' and creating a variety of this. We started off our morning by watching the landing pad which showed us a classroom that was designing with cardboard and creating inspirational words. We later split up our classes and took to inventing in both Ms. J's class and my own.

Before starting...we watched this short animated video called SOAR & discussed GROWTH MINDSET.

Cubelets

Today, for #GlobalMakersDay my Ss worked with Cubelets which are magnetic blocks that can be snapped together in many ways. These two figured how to get the block to shine a light, move and rotate. Sounds to me like they got the 'sound sensor' to work too!

What should Mrs. Taylor be for Halloween?

We got Ms. Patricia to model what she thought I should be for Halloween. A minion!!! She modeled her thought process and then the students took a few minutes to discuss their ideas with each other at the carpet. I love all the ideas my students came up with. In the past, I have been a black cat and a witch. Hmmmm...I wonder what I should be....

All About Bats!

We started off the week figuring what we already knew about bats. It turns out that Grade one's have a LOT of schema about bats! As a class, we read books & watched short videos to learn more about these creatures. Each time we learned something new we added it to our 'New Learning' chart on the board. These little mammals turned out to be such interesting research material that we are still talking BATS! Pretty fitting material seeing that Halloween is upon us...

Finding signs of Fall

Students had the task of finding numerous parts of nature that you usually only see in Fall. We found many different colours of leaves, fallen pine cones and berries on the tree. However, we scoured the playground for a fallen feather from a bird and could not find one. Maybe the birds have already flown some place  warm?