Fraction Trees and Letters to Haiti

We continued our Christmas fraction fun today by making Fraction Trees. The children could choose to do either a "thirds" tree or a "sixths" tree, construct it and then decide what fraction of the tree they would decorate. They labeled the fraction on the present under the tree and then added some fingerprint snow. Lots of glitter and snowy fingerprints all over the painting table! The trees look pretty though.

After a little trouble with the scanner I managed to safely send all our Holiday Greeting letters to Haiti and got them pinned up on the bulletin board. It looks very festive.
                                                                                           

Just to let you know...

I am playing with my blog's appearance :) It will probably change a lot over the next couple of weeks as I experiment. Bear with us as we renovate :)

Weekend Thoughts - and some new activities

I just read a very thought provoking post on Fourth Grade Studio (click here to read) - I left a long comment on it because it really struck home. Definitely go and visit Meg's blog whenever you can. She writes from the heart and I find it very inspirational.
We did a creative writing activity this week - Reindeer on Strike. I decided that we would plan it properly - class discussion, good planning sheets, rough draft, self-edit and then neat copy. It worked well and the children wrote some great stories. When I read Meg's post (above) I realized that I have come a long way as a teacher in the past year. With this writing activity I emphasized the need for capital letters and punctuation (as always) but I didn't obsess about it. This is a major breakthrough because I am an obsessive person. I like things to be done properly and I like to know that I (and my students) have done my/our best. Sometimes this is not a good thing. Sometimes I think it is best to enjoy the moment, messy and inaccurate as it may be! I have to say that my classroom and my house both reflect this "messy" attitude :) For some reason I am only obsessive about the written project. :) (In fact, as I write I can hear my husband puttering around with a broom - I love this man!)
Anyway - I have found that a relaxed attitude to the kids' work - while still holding them accountable to produce their own personal best - actually results in amazing work. I will remember this when it gets to National Curriculum Assessment time :)

And now, some new activities. My class, as a whole, loathe grammar. A collective groan goes up every time the grammar text books appear - and I can't say that I blame them. I always found it incredibly boring as a student as well. In an effort to make it more interesting I have been making grammar games this term and we have been playing with them. It has been great fun! We've played grammar bingo, noun and adjective sort, silly sentence trains, I Have Who Has games - much more interesting than just doing text book exercises. Today I finally finished putting them all together in a pack and have posted it to TpT - yay! Here's a link if you want to check it out. Grammar Games

And here's some pictures of the games in action. (Please ignore the absolutely FILTHY desks - we will be doing our Great Shaving Cream Clean Up next week before the holidays start. I don't know how they get their desks so dirty - it's a true talent that every single one of them has!)

                                                            Grammar Bingo

                                                   Silly Sentence Trains

                                                          Adjective Noun Sort

Sister School

This week we wrote letters to our sister school in the village of Bois d'Avril in Haiti. The grandparents of one of the children in my class live in Haiti and have sponsored the building of a small school in the village where they live. They asked us if we would like to correspond with their students and I leapt at the opportunity!

Bois d'Avril in Haiti - the school is the yellow building

We wrote our first introductory letters back in early November and scanned and sent them via email to the grandparents. Since they have electricity and modern conveniences (they also house the two teachers of the school) they were able to print the letters and take them to the children. We received our replies a couple of weeks later - written in Creole!! Translation was a bit tricky to say the least but we managed to get two letters put into English - my class were thrilled.

Here's one of the letters that the children in Haiti scanned and sent to us.

There are only 33 children in the school in Bois d'Avril and they are in classes K - Grade 3. We thought that they were the same age as our children but when we got the letters we realized that some of the children are 15! This is the first opportunity that they have had to get an education.
Our children are so privileged where we live - and often they don't realize it at all. Corresponding with this little school in Haiti has opened their eyes to the lives of others in a very real way.

We wrote our Christmas letters this week and we wrote them in French. The girls drew the most beautiful pictures they have drawn all year and their writing was wonderful. They wanted to do their best for their pen pals. We've also taken all our photos and put them on small Christmas trees so that our friends in Haiti can put faces to our names :)
We're hoping that this project will grow to become more than exchanging letters. Our dream is to be able to support this little school financially as well - to help provide what the children need to learn.

We'll send our Christmas letters on Monday - and I'll post some photos of them here too.
Does anyone else correspond with schools in different places?

Today was Gingerbread Day!

Today was the day! Gingerbread Day in Year 4! It was great fun :)
We started with handwriting - "Today is Gingerbread Day. We will be having a fun day!" then moved on to crown making. After that we had the whole year group (48 children) in my room and we did the Eat the Gingerbread Body Part  Bar Graph activity.
The most popular body part this year was ... the LEFT ARM!!

After recess we divided the children up into groups and rotated them through the three classrooms doing a different activity in each room. We had gingerbread house cards in one room...

gingerbread glyphs in the 2nd room...

and cookie decorating in room 3!

After lunch we finished our bar graphs and drew pictographs before heading off to specialist lessons. For homework they all have a mini-book story where they have to fill in the missing adjectives :)

It was a super fun day and we all enjoyed ourselves very much. I should have taken a photo of the 3 teachers dressed in their brown outfits, crowns and candy buttons but sadly I forgot :( Maybe next year!

Festive Fraction Fun

We made these CUTE fraction snowmen as an introductory/review Math lesson on Fractions this week. Since we did it step-by-step the girls had no idea what they were making until we got to the "Whole" head and drew the eyes and nose. Then there were squeals of delight as they realized that they  had made...

 ... a Fraction Snowman.

I turned this into a freebie for my TpT store :) You can download it here

Enjoy!

Swords, Shields and Snowflakes

We had an alliterative art day this week! We finished our Roman shields, constructed and painted our Roman swords (ready for battle sometime before the end of term!) and made snowflakes for the lower Primary Christmas concert and our own classroom. There was a little bit of Math in the form of measuring the swords and hanging the evergreen garlands (e.g. I have four 9 ft garlands - how many feet in total am I hanging? :) but otherwise it really was a very relaxing art day. We all need one of those now and then in school :) Here are some photos of our day.

 
                            We are the 11th legion!

The children designed their own swords and then painted them. Every single one is covered in blood! There are no pacifists in my legion!!

We used templates for the snowflakes - a little tricky for the children to cut out but glitter makes everything look good :)