Andreas Oertel

For those of you who don't know, Andreas Oertel is the author of the 'Archaeolojesters' series of books. The books are an series of action-adventure/history/archaeology tales, whose main characters are a trio of 12/13 year-olds (named Eric, Rachel, and Cody) who are from the fictional Manitoba town of Sultana. We've been reading the books in class, and just finished the 3rd book 'Trouble at Impact Lake'. At the back of the book, there is a page previewing the 4th adventure, called 'Panama Pursuit'. We were all excited to read it, but when I looked online to order the book, I couldn't find it. We went to the author's website, and couldn't find any information on the upcoming book. So, the students and I decided to use the contact form on his website to write and ask him about it... and he wrote us back... less than two hours later!! Wow, was the class (and I!) ever excited! Check out his response below...

Pay It Forward Day!

Today is Pay It Forward Day, and people in over 60 countries around the world are participating. The idea is to do 'random acts of kindness' for people, and thereby:

- to encourage all of us to embrace the incredible power of giving
- to show each other that we care and that there is love, hope, and magic all around us
- to know that we may be only one person in this world, but to one person, at one time, we are the world
(from payitforwardday.com)



The theory is that if we do this for someone, they will 'pay it forward', and do something nice and unexpected for someone else, and that this ripple effect will continue to move around the world. The students' task today was to come up with a list of things they could do (but normally wouldn't) to help a friend, family member, or a neighbour, without expecting anything in return, to try and make that person's day a little better. Here are some of their ideas:

Helping around the house instead of just sitting on the couch. - Kurt
Hugging my brother. - Erika
Make a special dessert. - Jade
Clean the toilet. - Jacell
Help my grandma clean her car. - Hailey K.
Not bugging my brother at home. - Joey
Set the table before dinner. - Lexi
Help clean the house. - Denisse
Do the dishes after dinner. - Logan
Clean the dishes in the sink. - Marie
Clean the house. - Gal
Give my brother a nice big hug. - Evan
Feed both of the dogs. - Emma
Make coffee for my mom. - Mikayla
Feed my brother's hamster and fish. - Jenna
Clean up the house before mom or dad gets home. - Hailey M.
Buy my sister her favourite kind of gum. - Braylin
Help my mom make supper. - Ava
Do the laundry. - Michael
Decorate my sister's birthday party downstairs. - Alexandra
Clean my brothers' rooms. - Kyra
Clean the toilet. - Cameron
Make my brother and sister a snack. - Dylan
Buy a pretzel for the person behind me in line at the pretzel stand, when I'm at tonight's Jets game. - Mr. H.

I'm looking forward to talking to the class tomorrow, and seeing how many of them decided to 'pay it forward'!

Thank you, Constable Siemann!

As we wrote in our last post, Constable Derrick Siemann of the Winnipeg Police Service came to our class to talk about bullying. Each of the students wrote Constable Siemann a thank you letter afterward, to show their appreciation to him. Constable Siemann was in the school yesterday, speaking with the Grade 5s. I passed on the students' letters to him at that time, and he was thrilled to get them. This morning, when I opened my email, there was already a response from him. Not only had he read all of our letters, but he answered all of the students' questions as well - wow! The students (and I!) were very impressed, and excited to read his responses - here they are for you to read, as well...

Hello Mr. Hoeppner and Students of Room 18 (Radisson School)

I just wanted to thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak to you about the important topic of bullying and for sending me all those letters with those kind words and super questions which I am going to try and answer for you.  So, in no particular order, here are my answers:  See if you can pick out which questions you asked me J

Yes I have seen a smaller kid bully a bigger kid

Yes I have seen bullying in Kindergarten and Grade 1

I’m sorry I can’t give you a ride on my motorcycle ( it only has one seat!)

I will tell your brother once he becomes a police officer not to throw you in jail!

Yes I love my job

Yes it is true some people do pretend to be police officers but only real police officers have photo identification and a police badge

Being a police officer can be scary but we are very well trained and I know how to take care of myself

I knew I wanted to be a police officer when I was in high school grade 12

I loved working undercover because I didn’t have to shave my beard!

I really liked school when I was younger

Yes I was bullied when I was in middle school but unfortunately I did not tell anyone because I did not know better.  I wish I would have received the information that I gave you

No I haven’t been bullied as an adult

I have visited over 200 classrooms over the past two years, wow!

I have seen way too many cases of bullying, unfortunately over 150

The “badest” case of bullying I have seen was were a little boy was beat up and had to go to the hospital

Thankfully I do not see bullying every day, in fact I know the message is getting out there that bullying is wrong

It took me over 5 days to make my slide show

Yes it can be hard being a police officer but it is worth all the hard work

My favorite part about being a police officer is when I get to give presentation to kids

Yes being a police officer can be exciting especially when we have to drive our police cars with the lights and siren on

No I haven’t pepper sprayed anyone

My job is really important to me.  I take it very seriously and I am very thankful to be able to serve and protect the citizens of Winnipeg

Yes I drive a cop car, usually a black and white one but sometimes a white “ghost” car

The rarest type of bullying is emotional bullying and no I don’t see too much of that

When I went to school I saw physical bullying the most and it made me sad

No I did not have another job before I became a cop other than I did deliver the newspaper when I was 12 years old

When I was little I wanted to be a hockey player, Go Jets Go!!!

Even though I am teaching in schools now, I do still catch criminals if I see one committing a crime

My 2^nd favorite police job after riding the motorcycle was when I walked the beat and patrolled downtown

No I don’t have a partner, I work all by myself

I have never used my gun other than when we practice shooting at our police firing range

Anyone can try to become a police officer.  All you have to do is stay in school, work hard, be kind (no bullying) and always try your best.

Yes I like dogs, I have a big black lab, her name is Mia.  I also have a rabbit and a cat

I hope everyone has a great day, take care.

Constable Derrick

Constable Siemann visits Room 18!

A police officer came to our classroom to talk about bullying. He showed us some videos. - Hailey K.

Today we got to have a police officer in our class, and his name Constable Derrick. We talked about bullying, and it was fun. We saw a funny video about bullying. - Dylan

First thing today, we saw a police officer, and some people were shocked because they didn't know what Constable Derrick was doing here. He was teaching us about bullying. He showed us three videos, and the third one was funny. - Alexandra

This morning we had a special event, which means it's something we don't usually do. A police officer came to our class to talk to us about bullying, and he was telling us about how bad it is to bully, and showing us a couple of videos. My favourite one was about the little birds being mean to the big bird. - Gal

We had a great start to the week, as Constable Derrick Siemann from the Winnipeg Police Service came to speak to our class about bullying. Radisson School had its Day of Pink a couple of weeks ago, but I wanted the opportunity for the students of Room 18 to hear some of this information again (it never hurts!), as well as being able to have some positive interaction with a valued member of our Police Service. Constable Siemann provided the class with an excellent 45-minute presentation, as well as a great Q&A session afterwards, where he answered questions about bullying, as well as some general questions about being a police officer, as some of the cool things he has done during his career. My students and I would like to thank Constable Siemann for spending time in our classroom today, and for giving us so much to think about! I'll leave you with my favourite line from his presentation: "Bad things happen when good people do nothing" - we all have the power to stop bullying, if we simply decide to not to 'do nothing'...

Happy Haiku Poetry Day!

As you may have seen on our Instagram feed this week, we have been working on writing haiku poems. For those of you who don't remember what a haiku is, it is a centuries-old form of poetry that originated in Japan, and the simplified definition of it is that it is a three-line poem that has five syllables in the first line, seven syllables in the second line, and five syllables in the third line. As a happy coincidence, we finished writing the poems on National Haiku Poetry Day - too cool! We decided to write ours about how we are tired of the winter-like weather conditions that currently exist in Winnipeg... even though spring officially started almost a month ago. I, like a lot of my students, love winter, but... enough already! Anyway, scroll down and check out the students' work - their haiku poems are really good!

Thank you, ManACE!!!

Today our class won a grant, but it was unexpected because Mr. H. had a sad face when he told us at first, and we fell for it. Then he said we won, and it was pretty awesome! - Kurt

Today Mr. H. told us we won iPod Touches, and we did this thing about what we like about snow and what we don't like. Our table group almost got a whole page of it. - Kyra

Mr. H. told us that received an email saying if we won the grant we applied for, and lots of people thought it was a 'no' because he was doing a sad face. But then he said that we won. - Mikayla

This afternoon, our teacher Mr. H. told us we won the prize from all the pictures we sent in to ManACE, and we won $450 so that we could buy iPod Touches for our class to use to work on our assignments. - Joey

As we told you about in an earlier post, we did some brainstorming with Ms. Malkoske's class on a project we're going to be working on together. Well, I'm still not going to tell you exactly what the project is (hint: it does have something to do with Instagram). However, our two classes had applied to ManACE (Manitoba Association of Computing Educators) for a technology seed grant, in order to purchase a couple of Ipod Touch devices for each of our classes to use for the project. Well, Ms. Malkoske and I found out on the weekend that our grant application was successful, so when I told the class, they erupted with cheers! A big thank you to ManACE for considering our application, and granting us the money to purchase the devices for the class. We can hardly wait to get them, and to start using them ASAP!

Welcome to Instagram!

For those of you who don't know, Instagram is an online photo-sharing and social media site. It's an easy way to share photos with friends, family, and other classrooms around the world. Instagram is primarily used by those with iOS devices (iPhone, iPods Touch, and iPad), but is also available on Android. It's really easy to share pictures with one of these devices - all you have to do is shoot a picture, pick out and apply a digital filter to the photograph, add a caption, and upload it to Instagram - it's that easy! The classroom learned about Instagram today, and some of the students even began taking and uploading a few photos, as our class now has our own classroom account - for those of you on Instagram, our user name is @mrhoeppnersclass. For those of you not on Instagram, fear not - you can still view our Instagram feed on our blog (look at the right-hand side of the page). We are going to be using Instagram to connect with a bunch of other classrooms in the near future, as part of a photography and writing project... but you're just going to have to wait a little longer to find out more about that! In the meantime, look at the right-hand side of the page, and check out the first few photos that our class has published.

A busy few days!

It's been a crazy-busy last few days, coupled with the fact that we had a long staff meeting after work yesterday, which has resulted in a whole week without a blog post. I don't like going that long without letting you all know what's going on in our classroom... but life happens!

Anyway, on Wednesday, our school observed the Day of Pink to raise awareness of the impact of bullying. We had a great school-wide activity in the gym, and many classes (including our own) continued talking about the impact of bullying afterward. Here are some photos from that great day:

Getting ready to start - look at all that pink!!!

Listening to Mrs. Cross talk about the impact of bullying.

The students worked together in their Family Groups on some anti-bullying activities.

Check out the great shirt I got from my friend Andy Mead, the principal of George Waters Middle School!

 

Something the students have been working on in the classroom lately during our Daily 5 time is their PIPs (Personal Inquiry Projects). Yesterday was the second time students have presented their finished projects, and they were quite impressive. It's so amazing to see how hard the students worked on these not only during their Daily 5 time, but also at home on their own time. Here are some of the presentations from yesterday:

Hailey K. presented her poster on the Yukon Territories.

Gal presented his poster on some of the different characters from the Marvel Universe.

Braylin, Ava, and Kyra presented together on the solar system (check out Braylin's amazing model!).

Denisse, Hailey M., and Lexi presented on the Philippines...

...and Denisse brought in puto (traditional muffins) for everyone in the class - yum!

Today I put the posters up in our PIP gallery, so other students could have more opportunity to check out their classmates' work.

April Fools' Day writing

As you read on our April 1st post, I fooled the class really well with Google's Google Nose April Fools' Day prank. It was an activator for them to write about the best April Fools' prank they've ever been involved with. They finished writing about their April Fools' experience on Tuesday, and typed them up today. So, I've now created a new page on our blog where you can read their work called The Best April Fools' Ever! Click on that tab near the top of the page, and prepare to laugh! We'd love to know what you think of their writing, so feel free to leave your comments on that page (you can also read the students' work on their Kidblogs, which you can get to by clicking on the Kidblog icon on the right-hand side of the page).

Skyping and collaboration

We had the pleasure of Skyping with Ms. Malkoske's class this afternoon. I don't want to give away too much too soon, but I can tell you the following information: we've started working on a project together. We all talked via Skype this afternoon, where Ms. Malkoske and I explained the project to our students. The students then did some brainstorming together as classes. Afterward, in my class, the students continued to brainstorm, first as individuals, and then in small groups (while the students in Ms. Malkoske's class did their own brainstorming). I was really impressed with the ideas my students were coming up with, and I know Ms. Malkoske was impressed with her students' ideas, too. However... that's all the info you're getting for now - you'll have to stay tuned to see what we've got in store!

Algebra?!

Today we started working on algebra. When I asked the class if they knew what algebra was, most of them said that they had heard of it before, but weren't sure what it was. We talked about how it taking the information you have, and using it to solve for a symbol or letter in an equation that isn't known. This sounded complicated to them... until we started to do just that. The students worked in groups to solve pan balance problems - that is, problems using a balance scale to tell us when each side of balance was equal. So, by finding out that 2 squares was the same amount as 1 circle, 1 triangle equaled 3 diamonds, 3 circles equaled 2 triangles, 1 square equaled 1 diamond , 3 squares equaled 1 triangle, and 1 circle equaled 2 diamonds, and knowing that 1 square was equal to 1 unit, the students were able to find out the values for the circle, triangle, and diamond. It took a bit of work at first, but by the end, pretty much the whole class had the hang of it. I love teaching math, and it's always exciting to see 'the lights go on' in my students when they initially grasp a concept. After working together on it in class, they had the opportunity to work individually on some pan balance problems of their own. If you'd like to try these problems out for yourself (or, if you're one of my students and you didn't finish working on the problems in class), you can find the problems here. Enjoy... and good luck!

Using the pan balance to gather the information needed

Using the information gathered using the pan balance to solve for the unknowns

Some of the work the students did, using the information gathered to solve for the unknows (hey... that's algebra!!!!!)

Working individually in the computer lab, solving their own pan balance problems

Happy April Fools' Day!

We had a great first day back from Spring Break today, as I had the students do some April Fools' writing about the best prank they've played on someone, or had played on them. As an activator, before I told them they'd be writing about April Fools' Day, I told them about this really cool thing Google had developed that I wanted to show them, and then played the following video for them:

I can't remember a time where I've 'gotten' a class with an April Fools' prank better than I did with this one - it was fantastic! The whole class was oohing and ahhing, and I had no shortage of volunteers asking to got up to the SMARTBoard and 'smell' things like wet dog, cookies, and roses. They're going to be sharing their writing with you later this week/early next week, so stay tuned!