Global Pumpkin Seed Project

This morning we participated in a global pumpkin seed project.  See the instructions here.  We asked our families to donate a pumpkin.  We received 9 pumpkins, so each table was ably to do their own pumpkin investigation.  Students predicted, weighed, measured and counted during their investigations.  We had so much fun!       Here are some padlet walls with our learning from the day.  We first scanned the QR code for the K in what we KNOW about pumpkins, then we did the W for the what we WANT to know about pumpkins, then we did the L for what we LEARNED about pumpkins.  

Created with Padlet

Created with Padlet

Created with Padlet

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Welcome Primary Blogging Community

  We are in the fourth rotation of our blogging community group and we are the focus class this week.  We would like to welcome you to our new class blog.  We live in Windsor, Ontario, Canada. Our school's name is Eastwood Public School.  We are a kindergarten to grade 8 school, with around 300 students.  We are an open concept school, which means that there aren't many walls in our school.  We share a large room with 2 other classes and 2 other teachers. We are fortunate to have 20 iPads in our room that we share, and an Apple TV.  We love creating content and sharing it with our peers through our blogs.  We also have a classroom Twitter account that we tweet from daily.  Please connect with us @MrsWideensClass. We are very excited for this Thursday because it is Halloween and Read-O-Ween, here at school.  We will be reading in the morning, then we will travel to different classrooms to participate in various literacy activities.  We get to dress up like our favorite book characters.   Please take a look at our posts on our blog.  We can’t wait to connect with you!

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We Were Picked For Class Of The Week!

Today, AM 800 came to our classroom because we were picked as their class of the week!  Mr. Arms Bumalag came in and talked to us about being on the radio and television.  Did you know that approximately 1500 schools apply to be classroom of the week? He then interviewed some of the students about what they were going to be for Halloween.  The interview will be on the radio tomorrow.   It was a real honor!  We also each got a pancake breakfast from McDonald and a new backpack!

   Posing with Arms.

Yummy pancakes!

Our new Backpacks!

  Sharing our Halloween costumes.

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Learning About Nouns

Today we had a refresher on what a noun is.  We also talked about proper nouns and that they ALWAYS begin with a capital.  We first watched a short video about nouns on Brainpopjr.  We then made an anchor chart about nouns.  Students were then given the choice to create a chart on the iPads using the app Popplet or they could use their thinking books to show their learning.  Here are a few of the finished pieces. Some of the students also published their work to their blogs and on Twitter.  

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O.R.E.O Challenge

  Last Friday we participated in the O.R.E.O Challenge. This challenge was created by a teacher Jen Wagner .  She invited Classrooms around the world to participate.
Each student needed to stack oreo® cookies as high as he or she could and then average all their individual results to achieve a final Class result.  We then recorded the results on the main project webpage to see how our average measured up to the rest of the classes.  (Our average stack was 19). After the students finished the stacking they were invited to create a sculpture from the Oreo cookies that were used.  It got very messy and fun! Here is a short video on the O.R.E.O challenge in our classroom.

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Learning About Patterns

We just completed our first math unit on patterning.  We love using our iPads to capture and show our learning.  Here are a few of our learning goal we completed and a few examples of how we showed our learning using our iPads: Learning Goal -  to be able to create a pattern and explain the core Students took a picture of their pattern then use an app to draw a circle around the core of the pattern and uploaded it to their blog.  Here are a couple of examples:

 

The second learning goal was to be able represent a pattern in different ways.  After the lesson.   Students got out the iPads, manipulatives, paper, markers and whatever else they wanted that would help them to answer the problem prompt. Create a pattern using three colours of snap cubes.  Find another way you can represent your pattern.

 

   

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Classroom Tadpoles Live Stream

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Tadpole Inquiry

This week Mrs. Wideen brought  in 2 jars with tadpoles.  Within 5 minutes of sharing what she brought in, we had at least 15 books on frogs spread across the carpet and students were researching how to take care of tadpoles.  They were making connections, questioning, inferring, determining importance and synthesizing information while being engaged and working on a real life question that were important to them.  As the nutrition bell rang, all of the students kept working because they wanted to make sure that we knew how to take care of our new tadpoles.  In half an hour they knew how to feed them, learned about how to replace the oxygen in the water, the life cycle of the frog and showed their thinking by making lists, webs and blogging their findings.  Just today, one of our Tadpoles has grown little legs!  We will be learning more about these little creatures throughout the week and at our literacy and science stations.  Check out one of the student's blogs that posted a video of the tadpoles today kidblog

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Our Non Fiction Books

Today many of the kids uploaded their non fiction books onto youtube.  Just click on a student and it will show you their video.

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More Measurement Fun

Today we created measurement gardens.  The students were given a large piece of white paper with 6 rectangles on it.

Students were asked to draw flowers in each of the rectangles.

Students then received a blue piece of construction paper for the background and a piece of green paper for the grass.

Next, the students glued their flowers onto their papers.  The grade 1's measured their flowers with cubes and the grade 2 students measured their flowers in centimeters.

Lastly, the student's wrote their measurements on their papers.

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Cross Country Collaboration Project

I am super excited to announce our next collaborative project.  This project has been on the back burner for months now, and we are finally ready to begin.

Mrs. Soltauheller and I have done many collaborative projects with our classes over the past 2 years, and I think this one is the most exciting!  We wanted the project to incorporate writing, science and social studies.  We also wanted there to be an authentic audience for our students to attract more interest and to grab our students' attention.

We decided on choosing an animal or insect to send each other that lives where we live, but does not live where the other class lives.  Mrs. Soltauheller's school is on Vancouver Island and we live in Ontario.  Mrs. Soltauheller chose the orca whale and I chose (with a little help from my principal) the praying mantis.  We agreed that we would mail each other the stuffy and that we would create a blog for the animal on our classroom kidblog accounts.  Students will begin taking home the whale (named Haley) or the praying mantis (Elroy) TODAY!  Students will be taking Hayley over night and blog about their adventures.  After everyone has a chance to take Hayley home we will do an Inquiry about orca whales and answer our Essential Question, "Why don't orca whales live in Windsor, Ontario?  We will then share our projects with each other via Skype.

To add to the excitement of this project, my students will be taking home an iPad with Hayley to document their adventures.

This past Friday we brainstormed ways to fairly choose the order in which Hayley would go home with.  We then googled it and found a website that randomizes lists for you.  We typed in all the students names and hit the randomizer button and just like that we had a list!  The kids thought it was magic!  Here is a screenshot of the list:

I made a schedule and sent the calendar home with the students.  If you would like to check out how Hayley is doing, check out her blog here

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Learning About Measurement

Today we did a very fun activity with all the classes in our pod to learn about non standard measurement.  Mrs. Wideen read the book, "How Big Is A Foot?".  The book was about how the King wants to give the Queen something special for her birthday. The Queen has everything,  except a bed. The trouble is that no one in the Kingdom knows the answer to a very important question: How Big is a Bed? because beds at the time had not yet been invented. 
The king decided to measure the queen by using his feet.  He told her to lay on the floor and measured her by how many feet wide and how many feet long she was.  We learned that the bed that was made was too small for the king because the carpenter that made the bed had much smaller feet.
We tested this theory by measuring out our teacher's feet and making a pretend bed on the floor and measuring out a bed using some of our friends feet.  

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Clementine Read Aloud

Today we started our new read aloud titled, "Clementine".  We just finished reading Flat Stanley and Mrs. Wideen signed us up to do this read aloud with 17 other classes around the world.  We have a reading schedule for how many pages Mrs. Wideen has to read to us a week.  Today we read the first chapter of Clementine.  Mrs. Wideen made a new room on Todaysmeet so we could discuss the book with the other classes.   We then tweeted the prompt on Twitter on our class twitter account @mrswideensclass so the other classes would know and could join in the conversation if they wished.  Here was our first prompt that we answered today:

On Wednesday we are going to read chapter 2 via Google Hangout with another class and discuss our predictions and question for chapter 3.

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Using TodaysMeet During Literacy

This past week, we had the Early Years Teachers, Our Vice Principal, and Mrs. Wakeman in to see how we incorporate our ipads and technology into our classroom.  We showed our guests how we use a website called TodaysMeet.  This website encourages the room to use a live stream to make comments and ask questions.  Students used a QR code I created to quickly scan it using their iPads where it took them to the site Todays Meet.  We have been working on making meaningful connections the past few days in class so I asked the students to make text to self connections while I read the story Koala Lou.  

Our guests were amazed at the engagement of this lesson.  My students typed feverishly while I read Koala Lou.  I stopped periodically through the story to make my own connections and to give my students time to add their connections.  You could hear a pin drop in my room during this activity.  When we concluded the activity, I told them we would come back to their connections the following day to figure out which kinds of connections help us the most.  My students couldn't wait to follow up the next day.

Have you used TodaysMeet?  We would love to hear about it!

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