Division 10's News of the Week

The sun is shining and the birds are chirping and it looks like we will be having another wonderful day in Vancouver! Wasnt our weekend beautiful!! I saw so many happy faces on the North Van seawall and people playing and running in the sand at the beaches. I hope everyone got out and played and enjoyed the Vitamin D!!!

We had a very busy week at school....you should hear about all we did.
We were busy gardeners all week. On Monday Hannah (Eli J's mom) came in and helped the children plant our spuds in tubs...they are sitting in the window ready to start growing now. As we watch them grow we will hill them, water them, fertilize them and when the plant is higher than the top of the tub we will be carrying them out to our gardens at the church where we will be letting them grow and then harvesting them at the end of June.

We also planted tomatoe seeds with Jen (Ayana's mom) and basil seed with Jo (Caspers mom) they are all sitting in our classroom waiting to sprout. When they sprout we will start transplanting them into larger containers until they too will be taken outside and planted in our gardens.

As we plant we talk...we talked about the parts of all plants and particularly looked at the parts of a potato plant starting at the "tuber" that we planted. The children then did some beautiful hands on collages of what a potato plant will look like when it matures.

Other things we have done in the classroom besides learning about plants (which we will continue to do)
1) We wrote spring stories and began some beautiful paintings looking at apple blossoms.
2) We worked in the library with Ms. Whitelaw and are doing an author study on Steve Jenkins. He is an amazing non fictional author and artist. His books are all about animals which he writes so magically and then uses collaging as a technique for his art. This last Thursday we worked on a book called Just a Second. In this book he discusses what can happen in a second, a minute, an hour, a day etc. We tried to see how many times we could blink in a second (not many) and how many heart beats we have in a minute . We will continue this author study with Ms. Whitelaw for the next six weeks.
3) In Math the grade 2's are working on double digit adding with regrouping. We used manipulatives to really get the concept across and it was interesting as they all said it was easier without the hands on manipulatives! I want them to see what they are doing, and why they are doing this thing called "carrying", not to just have it be rote, eventually it will be rote. The grade ones are working on adding and subtracting numbers to 12.
4) In cooking the grade one b group made some very delicious irish soda bread to share. Very yummy!

So as you can see we have been busy in the classroom! The children continue to work on being mindful workers...that when we work we concentrate on the job on hand , not on anything else...not on recess, not on skate boarding etc. They are getting better and better at this. Congratulations to Ayana and Leah who have shown what a mindful worker can get done in a day!!

With that have a great Sunday and enjoy the beautiful pictures!!
teri