Positives to start the week

Last week was a little stressful what with preparing a whole week's worth of sub plans in advance - as well as trying to cover the week's regular plans...

... so today is a good time to focus on the positives!

1. I made it through the week and got everything ready for my sub :)

2. My kiddies were very well behaved, got ALL their work finished to a good standard and we even spent an entire afternoon painting with NO spills! That has got to be a record!!

3. I managed to get packed for my conference - and found something halfway decent to wear, that fits somewhat comfortably, for the formal requirements. This is an enormous positive because my wardrobe is decidedly sparse at the moment thanks to a "slight" increase in body size. (Well, okay, it's more than slight but I'm working on it!!)

4. I will enjoy being in Florida for a week - I will, even if it IS 90 degrees. I realize that a lot of people would love to have hot weather but I am a cold weather person so I am trying really, really, really hard to believe that 90 degrees will be wonderful.

5. I am looking forward IMMENSELY to meeting students and teachers from around the world and sharing ideas with them. (I am trying to look forward to the possibility of "adventures" for which I am entirely unfit - like possibly "slogging through the Everglades", according to our schedule. It will be exciting, right? Yes, of course it will. It will!)

6. Although I will miss my daughter's trip home for Canadian thanksgiving, she will at least be here in time to look after my dad's dog, as well as my own two. This will be a huge blessing for my husband who looked at me in horror when I told him that he would have three dogs to look after while I was away. (He's not a dog person :) )

Lots of positives - and I'm sure I'll have many to share next week :) Have a wonderful week everyone!!

Starry Pumpkins

I'm going to be away from school next week at a conference so I've spent the whole week getting ready for my sub - stayed at school till nearly 7 every night photocopying, writing reams of notes, trying to remember where each child was supposed to be each day... I think I'm a controlling person :)

Anyway, I got  it all done and walked out today leaving a pile of neat little folders marked with each day of the week and all the plans for every day, plus every supply possible needed, piled on the counter.

So since everything was done and my kiddies have been so good this week we painted all afternoon on Friday :)

I found this awesome idea on Deep Space Sparkle, which is one of my new finds in the art blogging world :) and adapted it slightly for my third graders. I think our pumpkins turned out beautifully and it was such a peaceful afternoon!!

We begin by drawing a pumpkin, paying attention to
the lines and trying to make them curve. :)

Then we started to paint

Getting the hang of lightly brushing and blending
different colors took a while...

... but we got there eventually

We also painted green paper for leaves
and stems, then hand-drew our pumpkin
vines and cut them out

Once the pieces were cut out and place to our liking
we glued everything onto the black background

We added a moon...

... and stars...

   

... and voila - a starry pumpkin patch!!

I think my kiddies did an awesome job on these - and they look SO pretty out on the corridor bulletin board!!

So I probably won't be able to post while I'm away since I looked at the schedule of this conference and realized it begins at 7.30 every morning and ends at 10.00 at night!!! 

Oh well... next week is another week and hopefully I'll have lots of amazing photos of the Everglades to share :)

Have a great weekend everyone - and enjoy next week. :)

Catapults, marshmallows and acorns

We had an awesome day today!!

We continued with our science unit in the morning - solids and liquids - by watching ice cubes melt. :) I froze them in muffin cups with "surprises" in them so the solids were avidly watched for 2 hours and 15 minutes until they released their prizes. We checked and documented every 30 minutes in between discussions and exploring a fun Bitesize science interactive demo on the smartboard. I had a surprise walk-in observation but since the kiddies were thoroughly enjoying themselves AND were super engaged in the lesson I didn't mind at all! Always a good thing when that happens!!

Here are our ice cubes melting - with lots of eager little hands crowded around. :)

After recess we moved on to Math and had a team game to practice rounding to the nearest ten - Acorn Round Up!!

It was unbelievably noisy but the girls LOVED it and actually asked to play it again tomorrow!!

Each team got several squirrels with numbers under them - 2-digit, 3-digit and 4-digit numbers. The acorns had rounded numbers that matched the squirrels' numbers and I stuck these onto two large trees that I drew on the white board.
The kids had to take turns to round a squirrel number, race to harvest the acorn, return the acorn to their team table and pass the squirrel to the next team player to round her number. They recorded their results on sheets so that I could check them at the end.

It was GREAT!! The shrieking had to be heard to be believed but the rounding was pretty good!! Only one team member could move at a time and they could only help each other by providing the strategies - no doing the work FOR each other!

Watching some of the smaller people jump up and down trying to reach an acorn (before thinking of getting a chair to help them) was hysterical. :)

Trees waiting to be harvested

Helping the squirrel find an acorn

Racing to round!

This child was jumping to get an acorn!

And we ended our day by making catapults! Yep - this was our writing activity this week: practicing writing up an experiment. :)

And it doubled as a topic activity since the ancient Romans used catapults so we were investigating this aspect of Roman warfare a little early. Mind you, the Romans didn't get to use mini-marshmallows as their ammunition! :)

Construction begins

Adding the vertical supports

This pair used a LOT of tape to secure
their catapult

Almost ready to fire!!

One lethal marshmallow ready to launch!

 

It's too bad you can't see their faces because they
were LOVING this!! On the other side of the room are
all the people under "attack" with their mouths
wide open to catch the falling "rocks".

And in between all this excitement we had our photos taken for the year book. When it was all over one of my kiddies kindly told me that I really should have brushed my hair before my photo!! Oh well... I'll just make sure to put catapult pictures in the year book so everyone can see the reason I look a mess! :)

Puzzle trees

We pulled out the paints for the first time this term to try a seasonal project that I found on Gail Bartel's wonderful blog - thatartistwoman.org

If you've never visited her blog I highly recommend it!! She has amazing ideas and gives step by step instructions for all her wonderful projects so when I saw these cute puzzle trees I knew I wanted to try them with my kiddies.

They turned out beautifully - and we got most of the project finished in one afternoon.

We started by painting our backgrounds and while they were drying we painted puzzle pieces in fall colors.

I totally forgot to take photos until they were finished with the puzzle pieces so you can't see the different stages properly here - but Gail has it all step by step at the link above so definitely visit. (Plus her trees DO look more professional than ours :) )

Once the puzzle pieces were finished and drying we returned to the backgrounds to paint the bare trees. I think my kiddies did a really good job with these!!

And then we let everything dry overnight and glued on the puzzle leaves in the morning. I've mounted four, ready for the bulletin board and will finish the rest of them tomorrow. Then we're going to create some fall-themed word problems on giant puzzle pieces and scatter them among the art work for a fun display. (And it will give my girls some practice in creating word problems - I think we'll stick to addition and subtraction for now :) )

What do you think of our trees so far? Pretty nice, huh? :)

We don't have much of an autumn here - no real seasonal changes at all - so we have to create our own autumnal displays. This was our beginning!

Number lines continued...

Day 2 of number line exploration was... interesting.

Following on from looking at horizontal number lines - and exploring, discussing etc. the relationship of numbers to each other as well as doing a whole pile of thinking and explaining activities in our activity pack - I really thought that vertical number lines would be a snap. After all, we were only rotating the things a quarter turn.

Here's what really happened...

Hmmm....

another hmmmmm...

 

Very creative but not
quite there :)

So we repeated our round the room view and discuss - we looked at the one and only different number line and compared results ...

... and again a chorus of "ohhhh"s echoed around the room as children scurried to fix their number lines saying to each other, "See, I told you it was..." and "I knew we'd done something wrong because what was going to come after negative 1?"

I count this as a success. My kiddies are discussing and explaining and are getting used to the idea that it's ok to make mistakes. :) I've got to say I love this kind of Math!!

We moved on to the white board to see if we could figure out where to put numbers on different number lines with no scale markings. Do you know what the best part of this was?

EVERYONE wanted to try!! There was no worrying about getting it wrong or being embarrassed. They wanted to come up and try - and then explain why they put the number where they did. It was wonderful - and they ALL explained their choices in terms of numbers!!

"I chose to put the 10 here because the number line goes from 0 to 20 and 10 is half of 20 so I figured out where the halfway mark was and that's where I put the 10."

or

"Well, this number line goes to 100 and I know that 10 is a lot closer to 0 than to 100. I looked at the halfway mark and sort of made spaces in my head to figure out how close to the 0 to put the 10."

HUGE SMILE!!!

Another child had already filled in the 50
and this student is trying to figure out
where the 10 should go.

These were the three guesses - each
child explained why they made their
choice.

Then we filled in the scale
to see who was closest!
They were really all quite
good, I thought!!

So... an awesome Math lesson. The time flew by and the kiddies loved every second of it!! We even had time to look at some thermometers and start to discuss different scales.

We continue tomorrow - learning to add and subtract on a number line. We've pulled out our froggy number lines and are ready to HOP!!!

Happy Thursday tomorrow, everyone :)

Monday stuff...

Normally I link up to Positive Points on a Monday but I was a little premature and listed most of them yesterday so today I thought I'd focus on what we've been doing in the classroom for the last couple of days.

Despite our exciting science lesson with breakages and water spills we did actually manage to finish writing up our experiment. There were some very nice drawings of the liquids in the various containers.

In Math we started looking at number lines and oh.my.word!! We are definitely going to have to spend a little bit of time on this concept.

I started the lesson by giving pairs of children a blank number line and 12 random numbers including a 0, four negative numbers and assorted positive ones - just to see what they would do with them.

It was interesting to say the least. Look at some of the first attempts.

Interesting ideas :) They hadn't decided where to put
the zero at this point.

This team had a different idea.

An unusual positive section - you'll notice that the
numbers progress in an unusual way. :)

After giving them all some time to decide what to do with their numbers I invited all the pairs to wander around the room and look at what other teams did. There were some interesting comments:

"They haven't left any spaces. You can't put 2 and 4 beside each other like that."

"Their negative numbers are different from ours."

"Why did they do that?"

We all gathered around one table and discussed the number line. I didn't say what was right or wrong but just asked some questions and listened to the discussion. Then we went to the one pair that (thankfully) had managed to do everything right :) and discussed their number line.

We talked about leaving spaces for missing numbers; we looked at their negative numbers and realized that they could keep going "forever and ever" in that direction (and the other teams couldn't!); we realized that people had put their zeroes in different places on the number lines but it didn't matter because the numbers still had to go in the right order on either side of the zero... It was fascinating!!

Everyone then went back and made any necessary changes to their own number lines and we moved on to some worksheets. The lesson just FLEW by - and it was great exploration.

Tomorrow I'm giving them all the same number lines but this time they'll be vertical. :) We'll see how much they all remember!!

Great lesson! I loved it!!

And finally - I saw these CUTE little place value ice cream cones outside our Grade 2 classrooms!! Aren't they nice?

Looking forward to another fun day of exploration tomorrow :)
Ciao for now

Super duper giveaway! - and an update.

I had an exhausting week. Parent night went really well - and the classroom looked great - but I was TIRED by Friday.

Today I re-connected with my computer and discovered that Whimsy Workshop - one of my favorite clip artists - is having a FANTASTIC giveaway.

Her. whole. graphics. store!!!

Totally amazing!

I already have a lot of her artwork and it is truly beautiful.

So, hurry over and enter. You won't regret it!!

Here's the link: WHIMSY WORKSHOP:ENTIRE STORE GIVEAWAY

And what's happening in school?

Well, we did a bit more on our science unit (solids and liquids) - had a great crash of breaking glass when one child flailed around and knocked over the ONLY glass flask on the entire table - which shattered into tiny pieces everywhere.

Horrified silence from all the girls. Nothing from me. I was smothered in lavender oil and therefore totally calm so I got another work pack for the child whose work was soaked, moved her away from the glass, cleaned up all the water and shards, checked that everyone was wearing shoes to avoid any more drama - and carried on.

Love that lavender oil!! I'm going to invest in a few more bottles. I think I may need it this year :)

I think I'll break out the paints next week! Might as well see what chaos can result from that as soon as possible so I'm prepared for the rest of the year. :) 

Positives this week included:

Everyone got back from Dance 10 minutes faster than last week.

Everyone got their topic work finished and glued into their books in time for Parent night.

The hugs have started.

I remembered all my duties. :) (I was even early to them!)

All the conference spots but one were filled up on Parent night so no need for emails. Looks like I have some super organized parents this year - woot!!

I left my camera at school by mistake over the weekend so no action photos today :( but I'm trying hard to get back to a more regular posting schedule. 

This week we're starting work on number lines, thermometers, history sources - I WISH I had some real Roman artefacts but sadly I'll have to use photos - and will be doing some benchmarking in reading. I still have to get started on the class blog - that's on the to-do list - and introduce them all to Storybird... it feels like time is just rushing by so quickly!!

Well, gotta go and get started on my planning. Enjoy the rest of your Sunday, everyone, and have a happy week.