Happy Halloween!

It certainly makes Elementary teachers (and parents) happy when Halloween falls on a Friday!  The day can be a fun break from the ordinary and we don't have to come to school tomorrow with everyone tired or on a sugar high!  On October 31, the Grade 2-3's rotated through 5 stations to practice skills in a fun Halloween theme way.

Miss Martin, our Grade 11 student assistant, led the group in a game of Halloween word Bingo. The bingo "chips" were spider rings and other spooky things.

Mrs. Perreault led her group in some Math games using spooky dice.  In one game, called Spider, the object was to get the number 8 by adding and subtracting after rolling the dice.

I led a problem solving station where students read the clues on the Smartboard to decide how many ghosts and how many pumpkins were in their haunted house.  The picture below is the solution using bean counters for the following problem:

The number of pumpkins in your house is double three. 

 The ghosts and pumpkins in your house add up to 10 altogether.

 The IPads were used at the next station.  There were QR Codes that students could scan with the Ipad that would take them to Halloween books on videos on YouTube.

Another choice when at the IPads was to use the Cookie Doodle App to create a Halloween themed cookie.  Students could even eat the cookie, virtually of course!

 Another creating station was where students could make a card for someone to wish them a Happy Halloween. 

The day ended with treats and a party as well as visiting the haunted houses set up by Grades 7 - 12.  What a fun and memorable day at Reston School! 

Dinosaurs

Parents of Grade 2-3 class, did you hear about dinosaurs coming to life in our classroom last week?  These photos don't come close to showing the IPad app we used to bring the pictures that you can see on the table to life!  It is another example of Augmented Reality, like in our Dot Day activity. 

Our theme topic for the next few weeks will be dinosaurs and this was a great way to get everyone excited and Ready to Learn!  Our Literacy Time will focus on reading, writing and researching about these prehistoric creatures.  The content or knowing how to say the names or facts about them is not my goal here but many skills including using phonetic clues to sound out the names and reading fact books have a purpose when there is a topic a child is interested in learning more about.
I believe when children see a purpose for reading and writing, they are much more motivated to work at their level and break through to the next one!

States of Matter

This week we have been learning about the three states of matter - solid, liquid and gas.  Here is a video that I showed the class to give you a refresher:

We will be investigating the properties of solids and liquids in future experiments so be prepared for your child to want to try them out at home too!  Evaporation, condensation, freezing and melting are all words we will use to talk about when matter changes from one state to another.  We will also find out about dissolving floating, sinking and buoyancy during this Science unit.

Here is a link to the curricular outcomes for this Science topic:  http://www.edu.gov.mb.ca/k12/cur/science/found/kto4/2c2.pdf

Here is another link from the My Child in School website about Science : http://www.edu.gov.mb.ca/k12/mychild/grade2_science.html#0