What Have We Been Up To Now?

I am certain this is the question my principal asks every time he walks in our room! So many crazy things happening, but I truly love every minute of it! I have had more people tell me over the last few months "You are SO perfect for this grade level!" I think it is my relatively sing-songy voice and penchant for dress up!

Here are a few things we did over February and March!

 Every year, the Grade Seven and Eight students take on the leadership role in preparing our School-Wide Winter Fun afternoon. This year, unfortunately, we had zero snow! 

They came up with some great alternatives. 

-The teams built "snow towers" from marshmallows and tooth picks.

-They pitted teams against each other in "snow volleyball" (played with white balloons) and "snowball fight" (seen in the picture, using crumpled up paper). The last one was held in my room. I found those little crumpled up balls for a week afterwards, on the tops of bookcases, in my bags and even inside a students' desk!

 -Teams created their own team poster. Each team had a colour and a cute name like "Purple Ponies" or "Snow Ninjas". Some teams really went overboard with the glitter paint!

-And lastly, they set up a great obstacle course using chairs and tunnels and pylons. Each student had to put on a ton of snow gear (mostly my husband's!) and climb through. They did a great job planning and leading their teams!

 

During our animal unit, we focused on Birds, Reptiles and Insects this year (we do the others next year because of the split grade). I love tying in our art lessons with our science, so we made cute Handprint birds and Nests. This was SUPER messy, but a lot of fun! The pieces that made up the nests created the most mess, but my kiddos are great sweepers and I had TWO parent volunteers that day!

We have been working on Procedural Writing (How To) this month. We put pictures in order and then wrote about them, we made sequences for stories we read and then drew the pictures, and then finally we chose one thing we knew how to do and planned, drafted edited and wrote out our How To's. They turned out so cute! This one cracked me up, coming from a Grade Two student. It explains "How To Drive a Car"!

In our Bible lessons, we have been talking about the Sermon on the Mount and we learned that God takes care of the birds and the flowers, so we know he will take care of us because he loves us even more. To remember that, the students wrote about what God provides for them and made borders of birds and flowers. They did a much better job of this than I imagined. I love the little birds on this one!

And LASTLY, we celebrated Dr. Seuss's birthday! This year, our school is performing six Dr. Seuss books as our Spring Play, so the whole school was pretty into his birthday.  I even came in my most festive Hat and Tie! We painted Truffula Trees (water colour paint, then we traced the outline with black markers the next day). The students also wrote about their favourite stories. It was great day!