Wednesday 29 February 2012

Jobs in Our Community - Lawrence's Mom

This afternoon Lawrence's mom Narin came to talk to us about her job with Canadian Linen & Uniform Service.  She showed us tons of great photos and explained a lot about her company.  We learned that they make uniforms, clean uniforms, and fold uniforms. We learned that they make napkins and table clothes and most linen things like that.  We learned that her company is very large and it uses a lot of really smart computers.  Narin likes every part about her job although her least favourite part was working with the napkins.  When she worked with them she had to work really really quickly and if she wasn't quick enough the machine would beep at her at tell her to  hurry up.  She didn't like that part because she was already working really fast.

It was really great to have her visit our classroom and share her job with us.  Unfortunately Ms. Lirenman FORGOT to take photos of her presentation!  Ugh, she is very sorry about that and hopefully she'll get another picture of Lawrence and his mom soon.

Tuesday 28 February 2012

Subtraction Mental Math Strategies

This week we have started to look at subtraction math strategies.  Today we talked about the strategy of one less than.  We learned that when ever you see a -1 subtraction equation the answer is automatically just one less than the first number.  To help us reinforce this strategy we played a dice game.

In groups of three most of rolled a twenty sided dice.  We then competed to say the number that was one less than what we saw on the dice.  Some of us were really fast at it, and some of us continued to improve the longer we played.  We tried to keep a tally of our scores, but most of the time we tied, so we all got points.  It was a lot of fun.

Here are a few videos of us playing the game.  Ms. Lirenman is still learning how to film so some are a  bit hard to hear but hopefully you get the idea of our game.  We are curious to see what other math games and secret math strategies we are going to learn this week.



Saturday 25 February 2012

Preparing for World Maths Day

On March 7th our class will be taking part in World Maths day.  We will be answering math questions on line while competing against children our own age.  Ms. Lirenman has given us a copy of our passwords so that we can practice both at school and at home.  Here's a little video of us practicing at school.


Guess What We Saw Friday Morning?

Unexpected SNOW!


It's too bad the rain arrived by lunchtime but it was fun to watch the surprise snow fall in the morning. 

Thursday 23 February 2012

Our First Video Made with Videolicious

Lately Ms. Lirenman has been allowing us to take more of the pictures.  Today she showed us a new app on our iPad called Videolicious.  Huda, Jennica, and Brooklyn took pictures with our class iPad while Claudine used the app to create the final video.  Here is our first Videolicious video.  Look for more to come.


Wednesday 22 February 2012

Jobs in Our Community - Marcus' Mom

Today Marcus' mom Maricel came to talk to us about her job.  She's a nurse too but a different kind of nurse than Koden's dad.  She works with patients that have kidney problems and need to have their blood cleaned by a machine.  She told us that her favourite part of the job is helping make people feel better.  She told us that her least favourite part of the job is having to work long hours and late hours from time to time.  Here are some of the pictures she shared with us.









Community Read iPod Style

Today was our first Community Read with the iPods in our classroom.  Typically Ms. Lirenman has one iPad and one iPod to share with her students during community read.  Today she had one iPod for anyone that wanted one.  Almost every child wanted an iPod to read with their families.  Here's the proof!












Welcome Quad Bloggers!

We are not sure why it has taken until this evening for Ms Lirenman to welcome our three quad blogging schools to our website.  If you're not already aware we are in week two of a four week quad blogging project.  So what is quad blogging?

Quad blogging is where you are matched up three classroom blogs from around the world.  As it turns out the three school we've been match up with are all from the United Kingdom.  Each week three of the four classes focus on the fourth blog.  It's our job to visit often and leave comments. This week our new friends  have been visiting us and leaving us comments.  Did we mention how much we love comments?  Ms. Lirenman is trying hard to keep our blog up to date this week so that our visitors can learn something new about us every time they visit.

If you're interested in visiting our quad blogging friends please visit their websites. Their address can be found under Fluffy, our class blog pet.

Have you ever been part of quad blogging? If you're interested in quad blogging check it out here.

Tuesday 21 February 2012

Learning Our Poems

About once a week Ms. Lirenman gives us new poems to add to our ever expanding poetry book.  We usually practice reading the poems in a variety of ways including boys only, girls only, echo reading etc.  We like to play detective with our poems too, searching for words that are on our word wall.  Here is a short video of us reading our latest poem, plus some pictures showing us finding our word wall words in the poems.




Look how good we are at finding word wall words in our poems.














Skip Counting by Twos

For the past couple of days in math we have been working on our skip counting by 2s.  Here are a few videos of us skip counting.




Here are some pictures of us writing out our numbers by 2s.















Monday 20 February 2012

Jobs in Our Community - Koden's Dad

For the next three weeks our focus in Socials Studies is jobs in our community.  What better way to learn about jobs in our community than be inviting our community into our classroom. What better people to start with than our parents.

Today our first visitor arrived, Matthew, Koden's dad.  Can you guess what his job is? He showed us some of his special tools including his stethoscope, thermometer, blood pressure cuff, pupil gage, and a needle.  He told us about his favourite part of his job - giving needles and making people feel comfortable while he does it.  He also told us about his least favourite part of his job - changing diapers on older grown ups.

Here are some photos from his visit.  Can you guess what his job is? Leave your guess in the comments section and we'll let you know if you're correct.












The iPods are Back!

When we got to school this morning Ms. Lirenman had a little surprise for us.  The school district's set of loaner iPods were back in our classroom.  Needless to say we're pretty excited to have them.  Unfortunately Ms. Lirenman says that they are pretty messy and it's really hard to find the good stuff on them so she's going to clean them up a bit before she lets the rest of the school use them.  That's maybe not such a bad thing because we can still use them.

Today during guided reading Ms. Lirenman was helping some of us work on our fluency.  How perfect really because we got to use the iPods to record our reading.  It was great to be able to listen to how we read so that we know where we need to improve.  Here are a few photos of us reading into the iPods.




Saturday 18 February 2012

Inside My Heart

For Valentines Day we filled in a heart made up of puzzle pieces.  In each piece we put something that took up space in our hearts because it was important to us. Obviously each heart looked different because we all have different things in our hearts.  We called this work Inside My Heart. Here is a little video of some of our hearts.  Enjoy.



Friday 17 February 2012

What a Wonderful 100th Day of School!

This year Ms. Lirenman was inspired to change up the way she's been celebrating the 100th day of school with her class.  This year she decided to do something different after watching a video  made by one of our blogging friends - Mrs. Cassidy.  We watched the video too and right away we started talking about ways we wanted to get to know the number 100.

Ms. Lirenman listened to everything we were curious to learn about the number one hundred, and she offered some additional suggestions too.  Then we had a week to think about it.

Today our 100th day finally arrived we were so excited from the moment we walked into the classroom.  Many of us brought our own 100 day collections to explore.


After a discussion about what we brought in we created two charts of the things that we wanted to discover around the number 100 and how we wanted to celebrate our 100th day of school.  We came up with a lot of exciting ideas.


With our big list made it was our job to sign up for what we wanted to do.  As we completed one task we signed up for another.  We did this all day long!  Needless to say it was a very busy day for us.  Here are some photos of us in action.  

In no particular order today we were....

Creating patterns on a 100 chart.

Sorting 100 Day Collections

Bouncing a ball 100 times.

Searching for animals on a 100 grid.

Watching a video on numbers to 100 and beyond.

Searching for numbers 1 to 100 in the classroom.

Running for 100 seconds.

Drawing 100 stick people.

Spinning a hula hoop 100 times.

Skipping 100 times.

 Writing our name 100 times.

Taking 100 pictures (or at least trying to).

Smiling 100 smiles!

Finding 100 numbers.
(well only 99 because we couldn't find the number 55)

Writing about our favourite part of our 100th day.


Writing about things we did on our 100th day.

Choosing our 100 day activities.

Bouncing a ball 100 times.


Making 100 style eyeglasses.

Creating with 100 pieces of lego.

Making 100 breakfast cereal necklaces.

Tweeting 100 tweets to #100daychat. (Okay we only tweeted 94 times)


Making 100 breakfast cereal necklaces.

 Drawing 100 stick people.

Taking 100 photos with the iPod.
(Or at least trying to.)

Still want to see more? Check out this video of all the photos of the day.  Many of the photos were taken by us!



How did  you celebrate your 100th day of school?