Life in the Roman Army

Our topic theme this term is Invaders and Settlers - specifically the Ancient Romans and the Celts - and we have been having a lot of fun learning about the two civilizations.

This week we've been learning about life in the Roman army, making shields and swords and building our garrison town - which is a Math project as well. It ties in very nicely with our Math unit on symmetry and making 3-D shapes from nets and we can throw in a little metric measurement as well. :)

We start by drawing nets for cubes. We'd already cut and folded some nets but this was the first time for my girls to draw their own so we used grid paper and went through it step by step. There were a couple of mistakes but overall they did a pretty good job.

Next we folded and cut a giant square for the base of the camp and glued it onto our Celtic land.

We measured and marked the midpoints of the square to make sure that our "roads" would be exactly in the center. Then we folded the roads to find their midpoints - and glued them into place. You can see some little Roman buildings being placed into the town already. :)

The walls came next. More measuring and cutting and folding - a little help was needed here but I was really pleased with how cooperatively everyone was working. :)

Once the walls were in place everyone decided how to place their buildings so that the garrison town would be perfectly symmetrical.

And then it was time to make the legionnaires! We're still working on this - and we still have to make the legion banners - but our towns are starting to look pretty awesome! :)

Stay tuned for more Roman fun in the following weeks. :)

All New Giveaway at The Teacher Studio

My good friend Meg is celebrating her blogging anniversary over at  The Teacher Studio!! Formerly Fourth Grade Studio, Meg has a brand new look to go with her new name as well as an awesome giveaway.

An All New blog look, an All New name, an All New year coming up - and lots of All New resources for teachers to find.

My own personal all new resource is the result of a request by a co-teacher of mine. She asked for an open-ended Math project with a Christmas theme, that involved dollars and mixed cents so I made her

The Fairest Christmas Tree!

For today to help Meg celebrate it will be on sale :)

Open-ended Math projects are great for cooperative learning, critical thinking and lots of fun!! 

(Check out this post to see some of the projects we've done in my classroom :) )

Open-ended Projects in action

And head over to The Teacher Studio to enter the All New giveaway!! 

Happy blogiversary, Meg! I'm glad we've met!! :)

Remembrance Day 2013

In Flanders Fields

By: Lieutenant Colonel John McCrae, MD (1872-1918)

Canadian Army

In Flanders Fields the poppies blow 


Between the crosses row on row, 


That mark our place; and in the sky


The larks, still bravely singing, fly 


Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago 


We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow, 


Loved and were loved, and now we lie 


In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe: 




To you from failing hands we throw




The torch; be yours to hold it high.




If ye break faith with us who die




We shall not sleep, though poppies grow




In Flanders fields.

Remember...

We have a public holiday on November 11th for Remembrance Day so I always talk about Poppy Day the week before.

My island home has been very blessed in that we have never had a war fought on our land although we have supported military bases of other countries and played our part in World War Two.

We have very few veterans left and nearly all of them fought in WWII. Very few of our young men or women have served overseas in war zones - which means that few of our children have been exposed to the loss and heartbreak that occurs when family members are lost.

Of course there are the children who know that their grandparents died fighting - and some have family members who are enlisted but they are the exception rather than the rule.

Every year I find it more and more difficult to help my class see the importance of Remembrance Day. We are so removed from the concept of war that they don't seem to be able to relate to the "remembering" aspect of Poppy Day.  For them it's just a holiday - a day off from school.

So we talk about Remembrance Day - about why we keep it, what it means. We read "Flanders Field" and discuss it and we watch a slide show that I made 3 years ago for an assembly - set to the song "Where Have all the Flowers Gone" - and discuss our reactions.

We talk about how war starts in our hearts - and how we can become peacemakers even when we are very little. We can forgive, we can be kind, we can find ways to solve problems.

And then we make our poppies.

This year I slightly adapted a project I found on thatartistwoman.

We painted coffee filters

We used 4 different colors

  

We painted the backgrounds grey and
added black splotches when dry

We drew stems and leaves on black card

We folded and cut our painted filters
into petals.

Then we shared our petals so that
everyone had a mix of colors

A poppy made through sharing

We glued the petals and stems and added a
tissue paper center

A beautiful Remembrance poppy

On November 11th - REMEMBER

My son on November 11th 2012

Pumpkins and Polygons

I decided that it would be fun to introduce measurement of weight (grams and kilograms) by using pumpkins (actually winter squash because, as you know, there are NO pumpkins here!) so I set up my center activities this week with that in mind.

Center 1: weighing pumpkins, converting grams to kilograms and back again, doing a little addition and subtraction with pumpkin weights, estimating pumpkin weights, holding different gram and kilogram weights... fun stuff.

Center 2: reviewing polygons and lines of symmetry (I stress the "reviewing" word here!) with nice bright orange shapes to fold and glue. Very hands on!

Center 3: reviewing place value by rolling fun foam place value dice with a group and then solving problems related to the 4-digit number that was rolled.

Center 4: practicing time - matching analogue, digital and written times with a cut and paste activity.

WHAT WAS I THINKING?!! 

This was NOT a sensible thing to do the day after a week of half term holiday!! My kiddies had clearly forgotten just about everything we did before the holidays - sigh.

There were some very....ummmm.... "interesting" answers on those papers. 

So today we went back to the drawing board with polygons and lines of symmetry and painstakingly, with lots of different colored pencils, drew lines of symmetry on regular polygons before playing a loud and boisterous team game at the end to see how much they remembered.

And... I breathed again. :) MUCH better. :)

Lesson learned - allow for a day of acclimatization before embarking on center work. :)

My Truth Monday

Denise at Sunny Days in Second Grade is doing weekly My Truth posts - helping us all to learn more about each other. I've been reading all the linked up blogs and they're fun!! So I decided to join in.

This week is: My truth about becoming a teacher

To find out how more teachers became teachers head on over to Sunny Days in Second Grade.

Autumn - our style!

So... back to school tomorrow after a fun holiday - and a fairly productive one too. I had an autumn-filled half-term break despite the fact that we don't really have autumn here! No trees change color on a tropical island and it remains hot and humid (in fact today is pretty disgusting!) so we kind of have to experience autumn vicariously in the classroom. :)

I love autumn. I like the poems, the colors, the imagery, the art ideas - it's such a great season - so I spent half term making autumn themed activities for my class. We will SUBMERGE ourselves in Autumn!

I'm re-doing my anchor trays for the second half of term with autumn themed activities - autumn math problems, autumn writing activities, autumn general knowledge; I'll do lots of autumn art to add to the pumpkins and leaves we already have scattered around and I'm going to start the 2nd half of term off tomorrow with autumn math centers.

We're reviewing symmetry and polygons, place value and time and I decided to introduce weight in grams and kilograms by weighing pumpkins and answering questions about them. I thought it was a great idea so I wrote the worksheets, got the scales, printed and copied everything and then went looking for my 5 pumpkins.

Wouldn't you think that just a couple of days after Halloween there would be pumpkins galore? Well, there aren't! In fact, I couldn't find a pumpkin ANYWHERE.

Zero. Zilch. Nada. NO pumpkins.

So we're weighing winter squash (sigh).

It's not quite the same (despite the pretty colors) but it will have to do. I hope they last until tomorrow - sadly one of them is already growing a little blue mold coat (it really IS humid today!) so he's been scrubbed and dried and is warming next to the stove. (Hope he doesn't cook before Math class!)

We'll see how it goes - grams and kilograms are always a little tricky the first time round. Last year we started by weighing the class tortoise but hopefully "pumpkins" will be just as much fun.

This is the activity we're doing - it's nothing fancy but if you'd like it a freebie then just click the link. :)

*freebie link*

I like my autumn task cards - and these (once they're cut up and laminated) will keep my speedy finishers occupied for a while. Plus I can use them as one-on-one support for some of the kiddies which will be helpful. Here's an example of what they look like in their pre-cut state. :)

And of course, even though Thanksgiving is not a national holiday here, a lot of my kiddies have American parents or grandparents and will celebrate the holiday. So we'll do some Thanksgiving-themed activities too. :)

I'm definitely doing Turkey's Thanksgiving Feast with my girls because they love open-ended projects. I'm donating all the proceeds from this project to Pencils of Promise (you can read about the organization here if you are interested) so if you'd like to share the project that would be great. :)

Hope everyone has a fun-filled and non-stressful week :) Happy Autumn!!