Spring Break Snapshot

Spring break has already come and gone, and since we've been back at school the boys and girls have been hard at work. They have written a paragraph to explain what they did on their spring break!

This was a great writing activity that started with a hamburger graphic organizer to organize our thoughts. We discussed topic sentences, conclusion sentences, jot notes, editing paragraphs, writing good copies, and many other writing topics in the process. The students started with a hamburger graphic organizer and we wrote down our jot notes for each sentence (what our sentence was going to be about in one or two words). After we had completed our hamburger it was time to put our jot notes into sentences to make our rough draft. The students were great at adding describing words to make their sentences "juicy". We then conferenced one on one to revise and edit our writing, so we checked for capitals, periods, correct spelling, missing words, etc. After our editing was complete it was time to make our good copy using our best printing. I was so happy with how well they turned out. The Grade 1's did an excellent job of using their nice neat printing and copying from their rough copy. The illustrations that were added brought our spring break paragraph to life! Enjoy looking through our work!

After A Long Hiatus...

After a very long time away from my blog I would like to re-join the blogging world, if you'll have me back!?

I am currently completing my final student teaching placement at Hamiota Elementary School in a grade 1 classroom! I am learning so much and am having a great time! 

Stay tuned for upcoming posts and pictures of what the students and I are up to! 

Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring!

With the changing of the seasons we've made wonderful poems called Goodbye Winter, Hello Spring! The students brainstormed a list of ideas that we were saying goodbye to as winter was ending. The list of spring ideas and activities got us thinking about spring and how much fun we will have once the weather warms up and the snow melts. Check out our list of ideas and how beautiful the poems turned out! I love the artwork that was added to the poems to make them extra special!

Track Your Trash

With Earth Day coming up on April 22nd we have been working on recycling and reducing how much trash and energy we use in the classroom! We came up with a list of ways we can do this in our own classroom. The Grade 1 boys and girls came up with a great list; it included some things such as:
-recycling milk cartons
-recycling all paper
-only use the amount of paper towel we need
-using cloths to clean spills not paper towel

The classroom energy diet challenge presented by Shell and Canadian Geographic Education is a competition among Canadian classrooms that aims to increase energy awareness among youth and educators. We have taken on the track your trash challenge for 10 points! Our challenge is to weigh our trash and compete to reduce more garbage than another classroom. So far we have been very successful and the students are becoming very aware of what we recycle and trash.
We are weighing our trash with a kitchen food scale and have had results ranging from over 1000 grams to having our least amount of trash today with only 240 grams!
Check out the energy diet website at http://energydiet.canadiangeographic.ca

Spring Is Here?!

I am so happy to be completing my last student teaching placement at Hamiota Elementary School with this wonderful Grade 1 class! We have been busy learning about spring and now that it feels like it's finally here we can show off some of our hard work!

We've spent some time measuring our heights with string and are proud to display them on our bulletin board outside the classroom; check out how our garden GROWS!