We Scare Hunger

The students of Room 18 are participating in We Scare Hunger, which is Free The Children’s annual campaign to mobilize youth around local hunger issues. Every October 31st, thousands of young people take action to scare local hunger and poverty. By trick-or-treating for non-perishable food items instead of just candy, they help support their local food bank and raise awareness about this very important issue. They not only make a tangible contribution to their communities, but also become knowledgeable advocates for change. In 2011 alone, over 290,000 people participated in the We Scare Hunger campaign. They donated a total of 833,648 pounds of food— enough to feed 164 families of four for a whole year!

So tonight, when the students of Room 18 go trick-or-treating, not only are they going to be looking to collect candy for themselves (yum!), they'll be asking for donations of non-perishable food items to help others. We're really excited to see how much we can collect!

Halloween Haikus

The students finished their haikus - check them out!

Halloween Haikus - brainstorming

Over the past few days, we've been working on brainstorming words about Halloween, and then learning about haiku poems (3 line poems that have 5 syllables in the first and third lines, and 7 syllables in the second line). Today, we wrote a couple together as a class, and then the students started working on their own Halloween haiku poems - stay tuned for the finished products!

Your Power To Choose!

It was a great election. I'm happy that people actually voted for everybody. - Austin

Steve and I were partners doing the ballot box, and his nickname for me was Prescott Gozda. - Maegehn

This is our first vote, and it was really fun. We got to do posters, and we had a guest teacher come in. - Kayleigh

I'm really happy because I won the election! - Taryn

The election was awesome because I got to vote. It was fun colouring the election signs. - Zoey

We had the privilege of having Mrs. K from Elections Manitoba come into our classroom today, and help us all learn about how elections work, and why they are important. Then, she actually had our class plan and carry out an election, with people filling different rolls such as candidates, returning officers, official agents, and so on (if you're not sure what some of those different rolls are, ask your child to explain it to you!).

(Apologies for the lateness of the post - something happened where I thought the post was published, but just realized it hadn't been! Technology sometimes doesn't work exactly as we plan for it to, but that doesn't mean we should give up on it - sometimes, you've just got to 'roll with it'!)

Plants and Habitats - adaptations

Continuing on with the work we've been doing in Science on Plants and Habitats, we had a discussion today on adaptations. We started talking about adaptations we, as humans, have to make to be comfortable and healthy in warm weather and cold weather. After that, the students browsed through books (books on plants for the Grade 3 students; books on animals for the Grade 4 students) to find different adaptations that plants and animals have, to help them survive and thrive in their environments, and then shared them with the class. There was a lot of great discussion that went on! Here are some of their responses:

Habitats and plants: food chains

We've been working on Habitats and Plants in Science, and I've been so impressed with some of the conversations I've been hearing in the classroom lately, as students work together in small groups and whole-class activities. Today, we were working on food chains, and the students did a lot of hard work trying to come up with their own food chains (and some really great questions during our discussions, as well). Here are a few shots of the class in action:

PD Day - helping our colleagues use technology

Today, while our students have the day off (lucky!), the teachers at Radisson School are engaged in some professional development. Mrs. Steinhoff and I are leading a session on some of the technology tools we use in the classroom. Right now, we're talking about how great it is to use the Blogger app to communicate with families. I wanted to show them how easy it is to take a picture and upload it using the Blogger app, and then write a quick post, so here it is - I hope some of them start to do some blogging with their classes!

Room 18's Cardboard Arcade - open for business

The arcade was so awesome, because of all of the games. I liked being able to try the other games. - Jaida

We all had awesome games! - Kaylynne

Today in the arcade, Maegehn and I put the fun in no refunds! - Emily

Today at the arcade, it was really loud. But, at least our eardrums didn't explode! - Maegehn

A lot of people went to our game. Ours broke down for a bit, so we had to restaple it to fix it. - Easton

I had lots of fun with my partner, and it was really fun to make the game. I had lots of fun because we got to use markers and staplers, which I think is really cool. - Kayleigh

I was amazed at how well the Kindergarten students did at the arcade! - Zoey

It was a lot of fun being able to run our arcade! - Faith

The cardboard arcade rocked! - Braedon

Well... today was the big day - the day that we opened our cardboard arcade for business! We were lucky enough to have every class in the school stop by to play, as well as quite a few of our parents and grandparents! It was a crazy, exhausting... and fun day of playing games and learning! One of my favourite comments of the day was from the Grade 1 teacher, who commented on how impressed she was with the way the students of Room 18 were encouraging her students with lots of compliments and put-ups - way to go, Room 18! I'll be posting video of each of the groups' games next week, but in the meantime, here are some action photos from today - enjoy!

Room 18's Cardboard Arcade - dealing with disapointment

Today was supposed to be the day that the students of Room 18 were to have opened the cardboard arcade to other classes in the school to come and play. As I walked into school this morning, it was fabulous to see how excited the students were to show the rest of Radisson School the games they had worked so hard on designing, testing, and building. However, the excitement quickly turned to sadness, as we found out that not one of the classes in the school accepted our invitation. To fully capture how the students felt, we decided to write a letter together - this is what they came up with:

Please, please come to our arcade! We are going to go crazy if no one comes to play. We worked so hard on these games, and it made us feel sad that no one signed up to see them. Every time you have invited us to your classes when you have worked really hard on a project, we have come to see it, so why didn’t you come to ours? If you don’t come to our arcade, then we made these games for nothing. Mr. H. spent a lot of our learning time helping us to make these games, and if you don’t show up, then we just wasted that time. Nolan’s mom helped us with our games, too. She could have caught up on stuff and paid bills instead of coming here. She will be disappointed, too! We are giving you one last chance – please come!

Room 18

Reorganizing our classroom library

Our organizing is getting better because it was messy at the start, but now it's getting more organized. - Easton

 

I know which books are in which bin now, because it's more organized. - Zoey

 

We put certain books in certain bins, so now we know what we're looking for, so we don't have to go up to Mr. H. and ask him. - Kayleigh

 

Thanks to our wonderful organizing team, we don't have to drive Mr. H. CRAZY! - Emily

 

Thanks to our organizing team, we have a great classroom because now we don't have to drive Mr. H. INSANE, and now he won't have a headache. - Austin

 

With our library being organized, our classroom is 10x better because I can find my favourite books. - Jaida

 

Now that we're organizing, there's baskets on a lot of the carpet, so we have to squish in together, but I just let everyone go first and proper spot. - Maegehn

 

Organizing a classroom library is a big job, and one that I haven't really tackled since I moved into my classroom back in 2006 (has it really been that long ago?!). However, I've been finding that the students keep asking me if we have a certain kind of book (which is apparent from some of the above comments!), because they don't know what is in the library. To rectify this, I decided that the classroom should re-organize our library. This involved sorting through all of the books, and deciding what categories we should put them into. Then, after beginning our organizing, and realizing that we had a lot of books that didn't belong in any of the ones the students came up with, we changed/added/removed some categories. I need to pick up some more bins to put our books in now, but other than that, this big job is almost done (I am toying with the idea of using an app to keep track of the books in our classroom library, but that's a topic for another post) - check out what this learning through 'controlled chaos' looked like:



 

Room 18's Cardboard Arcade - construction

This is the most fun thing we have done this year, so far. - Maegehn

This is awesome! It's all cardboard, no technology! - Jaida

In Room 18, we're starting to make our cardboard arcade. I'm really enjoying it. - Kaelyn

This is our first experiment with cardboard, and it's really fun because you get to use a lot of tape. Grades up to Grade 5 will get to play. - Kayleigh

Carboard + arcade = happy, happy, happy! - Steve

The students have been hard at work the past few days, and their awesome cardboard arcade games are starting to take shape - some students have even finished already! Thanks for Ms. Kolbuck for coming in and helping out our class during this fun (and slightly chaotic!) process - for a small taste of what's gone on in Room 18 over the last couple of days, check out the photos below.