Sunday, May 21, 2017

Spring Display Case

Near the entrance of our school, we have a display case where student work is featured. Teachers can sign up for a month to put their student work out on display. Since bulletin boards and student work displays are kiiiiind of my favourite thing - I signed up for the month of April! 

Since I teach the whole school, I had a lot of choices of classes to do a project with. I decided to go with my grade one kiddos as we were currently in the middle of their "Building Things" Science unit. We had done lots of different building tasks using materials parents had donated and still had lots of materials left to use.

We ended up making these cute little flowers that I came across on Pinterest. We happened to have a ton of egg cartons left over so obviously this project was meant to be!
To prep for this activity, I had pre-cut the flower shapes out for the kids. It was quite difficult and I wasn't sure if their little scissors would do the trick. We then painted them using tempura paint. We lightened all of the colours to create a more pastel palette for Spring. Each table had one colour of paint and we rotated through each of the stations to get all of the colours. We had to be pretty careful to make sure our paints didn't mix and create a brown colour instead. We waited a couple of minutes in between each colour to do our best to avoid this and the kids did such an amazing job! #proud

Once they were dry, we hot glued on a yellow pom pom in the center and created a simple stem. We needed something sturdy enough to hold the egg carton flowers upright, so we used a thick wooden stick, wrapped it with some green pipe cleaner and we were good to go!

As a little extra, we made paper flower bouquets. You can find the instructions here!

Before putting in our work, I decided to decorate the case as well. I added some paper (our school colours are blue and green), a border, created some letters using PowerPoint and it was ready for our work!
The kids were really excited and proud to see their work out on display.

Happy Spring!

Wednesday, May 17, 2017

Throwback #1 - Resolutions

Okay - I think I now understand the blogging/teaching/prepping/marking/life balance struggle. I guess I'll just have to backtrack and do a few throwbacks to some of the things that have been going on in Room 6!

First, I'll start by going back to January. Agh, January! Oops, that's waaaaay gone (it feels like this was only a few months ago - it's crazy to think it's already mid-May!!)

All of my division 2 students (grades 4-6) were a part of this New Year's Resolution board! The theme for this lesson was "start the new year on the right foot". Each student received a shoe template and were asked to make a New Year's Resolution.
Here was the completed board! I created some hills, roads and printed off some little signs and glued them to wooden sticks to pull it all together!
Before doing this, we reviewed S.M.A.R.T goals (Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely) and why people make New Year's Resolutions. We discussed how people achieve their goals as well as reasons that many are unable or give up. We do goal setting as a school, focusing on academic goals, so I asked them to work on a more personal goal - something that was completely unrelated to school. After brainstorming a few ideas, the kids were on their way!
They had some really thoughtful (and interesting) goals! Turns out a lot of my students are nail biters (ha ha).
This shoe template was found on google. I asked the kids to come up with a symbol or logo that represented their resolution to go inside the circle.
 By the time I did this activity with all of the grade 4-6 students, our shoe trail was quite long.
I made a resolution with the students to get more rest. 5 months in and I'm still tired 😂
#endoftheyearteachertired