Decorating our Gingerbread Houses!

We have really enjoyed talking about our Holiday Traditions.  Christmas is such a magical time of year!  Its always fun to hear the students compare "naughty Elf on a shelf" stories and talk about the fun things they do with their families over the holidays.  A few years ago, I decided to start a 'holiday tradition' in my classroom.  I wanted everyone to have the opportunity to decorate a gingerbread house which is something that my own daughters have done (and continue to do) every Christmas.  I pre-assembled the houses so they would be sturdy enough to hold lots of goodies and then just enjoyed watching the students transform their houses. We were so proud of our creations! Thanks Grade 2 for helping me keep this tradition alive!  I hope those houses made it home in one piece!  LOL!  Merry Christmas to all!

Sights and Sounds of the Season!

Our classroom has been a very busy place.  We got our letters to Santa done and our Christmas countdown has been on since the first of December!  LOL!  We have been thinking about past Christmass' and various holiday symbols and traditions and practiced our oral communication skills as we each took turns presenting these to the class.   We have also learned about Hanukkah and Kwanzaa which are celebrated at this time of year!  Ask your child to tell you about these celebrations! We made 'Holiday' Cards and even some ornaments to give as gifts (these are coming home tomorrow....so no pictures of the finished products as I don't want to spoil the surprise).  We talked about how these ornaments are more precious than anything you can buy in a store because they are made with love. We have also enjoyed carol singing in the gym with the whole school!   Only two more crazy, fun-filled days remain before the break!  Fasten your seat-belt...it's going to be fun!  

Our Trip to the Library, Downtown and the Museum!

We had a great time yesterday!  First we walked to the Library and Karen read us some wonderful Christmas stories. After the stories we made a reindeer ornament and we enjoyed our pizza lunch.
Amy from the Museum met us at the Library and we started our walk downtown.  She showed us pictures of the old stores that used to be downtown and we tried to recognize some of those buildings today.  While we were downtown we even saw Santa!  At the Museum we saw old toys that boys and girls got as gifts in the olden days.  We even got to play with a couple of old toys (there was an old, tin cat that you wound up with a key...it was cool). We made a Christmas Card from old magazine pictures.
Special thanks to Mrs. Zulu, Mrs. Chateauvert and Mrs. De Vries.
Here are some of the things that the children had to say about our day:

I liked when we saw Santa. -Spencer, Owen
I liked the craft at the Library. - Maeve, Mark
I liked the tin cat! - Aiden, Ryan, Hayley, Dylan
I liked seeing all the old toys. -Dominic
I liked seeing the wooden, Jacob's ladder. - Lu, Andrea, Hayley
I liked trying to get the ball in the wooden cup. - Madison, Emma
I liked seeing the old snowmobile. - Landon, Graham
I liked seeing the two toy dolls. One was made of string and one was made of corn husks. - Whitney
I liked the toys that were on display at the Museum.  - Charlotte, Dylan

I liked seeing the smiling faces of these WONDERFUL students as they learned a little bit about our town and Christmas long ago.

Holiday Performance!

We hope you enjoyed our performance of Toys yesterday!  The dress rehearsal and the evening performance were both very well done!  Congratulations to all students who worked so hard to remember speaking parts and words to all songs.  Seeing their proud smiles and hearing their sweet singing voices was the perfect way to get everyone in the holiday spirit!

Polygon Power!

We have been exploring 2D shapes/polygons in our classroom using a variety of math materials.
Students have been especially focused on the geometric attributes of each shapes - the number of sides and the number of vertices that each shape has.

We know that all polygons have straight sides and are 'closed in'.
We know that polygons can be regular...with equal sides and anglesOR they can be irregular...with different length sides and angles.

We have noticed different kinds of triangles, but they ALL have 3 sides and 3 corners.
We were surprised by how many different shapes have 4 sides and 4 corners.  We learned that these shapes have specific names (square, rectangle, rhombus, trapezoid, parallelogram) but that they are ALL called 'quadrilaterals' because they have 4 sides/corners.
We also learned the properties of pentagons, hexagons, heptagons, octagons, nonagons and decagons.

As always, we are playing a lot of games and solving some fun polygon problems to reinforce new vocabulary and to provide practice identifying, creating, comparing and thinking about the 2D shapes.

Geometry is Great!