Good Morning Everyone!
After a very wet Friday and Saturday I personally have started doing a sundance...and I think it's working, I see a tiny ray of sunshine over Stanley Park..so hopefully you can thank me later. Haha. I hope you had a lovely yesterday despite the rain!

We had to say good bye to Rodrigo on Friday. It was a short and sweet experience to have Rodrigo join us, but now the family has moved to Yaletown and Rodrigo will be attending Elsie Roy. Good luck Rodrigo! The children will be lucky at Elsie Roy to have the opportunity to meet you!

This last week we were in Butterfly mode. Our little caterpillars ate a lot of their honeysuckle paste, got incredibly chubby, shedded their exoskeleton a few times and are now hanging from the branches in their Chrysalis form. Within the next two weeks they should emerge and we will release our Painted Lady Butterflies. It has been exciting to watch the metamorphisis take place.

This Tuesday we welcommed Michelle to our classroom. Michelle is a student teacher from Staad, Switzerland. Every year I opt in to take a student teacher from Switzerland. I have found this to be an excellent experience for our children, for the student, and for myself to hear about another country and to learn from another teacher. Michelle has already dived right in doing art with the children, creating posters and teaching small groups of math. So if you see this beautiful dark haired young lady in our class, feel free to welcome her yourself.

This Thursday we had visitors in from UBC. They were graduating Dental hygiene students. They came in to do a presentation on Dental health. They showed the children how to brush teeth properly and basically talked about how to keep the mouth healthy. The children all received a teeth brushing chart to keep track of their tooth brushing as well as their own little tube of toothpaste.

This Friday we had Sarah in. She worked with a very small group today as some children were away and some were cooking delicious Rhubarb Muffins. They made little penguin puppets, did some poetry with their puppets and ended the class with some partner yoga.The children always enjoy Sarah's positivity and energy.

Comin
1) This Wednesday, June 1st is our annual Great Canadian Shoreline Cleanup. This is a program that supports the Socials Studies curriculum and will help the children understand ways in which they can care for their environment. It is a wonderful way to promote social responsibility. 

This is the schedule for that day:
9:10 We will meet in the gym for a presentation with Jill Dwyer. She will talk about the Do's and Don'ts of Beach cleanup. As soon as she finishes the presentation we will walk to Jericho Beach.
1000 The shore clean up is for about one hour, Then we gather and collect our garbage, take group pictures and leave.
1200 Back at Bayview for lunch.

If you can volunteer for this day that would be wonderful as we would want to break into many small groups and spread out to cover the most ground. We will be going rain or shine, so hopefully we can get many volunteers for this opportunity to give back! Will you let me know if you are volunteering.

2) On Monday you will be receiving a permission slip (hard copy) for you to sign and return asap. I have booked a series of field trips to the Purple Dragon Academy. We will be receiving three one hour lessons Karate lessons. In past I have found the opportunity to do karate with the kids has been wonderful. It teaches the children discipline, patience and self confidence. We will be walking their and back. The three days I have booked are Mondays June 6, 13th and 20th. The cost of the three karate lessons will be 10.00 for the children. I will cover the remaining 11.00 per child with my classroom funds that we get from the PAC for field trips (thank you PAC). When you get the form, please sign it and return the ten dollars with it.

3) And to the mommas, can you send the " you know whats" for the "you know whos" as soon as possible.

With that, enjoy the pictures and have a great day and I will see you all on Monday.
Teri

Brushing eggs ...ask your child.

Look at that giant toothbrush!

Caleb brushes some teeth.

Intense egg brushing.

Welcome to Michelle, our Swiss student teacher.

More teeth.

Our Butterfly stained glass pictures.

Even the paper towel is beautiful!

Look at the beautiful work!

Artists at work.

We love art!

Look at the concentration.

Theron worked so hard on this cover we needed to take a picture of it. Gorgeous!

Michelle teaches the children how to printmake and they made some beautiful suns.

Good Morning Everyone,
It has been a lovely, warm week at school so to wake up to the little bit of mist and drizzle is quite refreshing. I know my garden at home will love it as will our garden at school. Last week we had to walk buckets of water to our gardens (thank you to Lindsay, Makyn's mom) who took all the children out bucket by bucket to water the beautiful potatoes. The little knob to turn on the tap was misplaced...but all is good now. Soon we will need to have parents volunteer to go out and water our garden using the hose (not the bucket method) as the weather is requiring daily watering. Ms. Jung's potatoes are a little bit bigger than ours but dont worry...ours will catch up!! 

This Monday we will have Nikoo joining us to do some transplanting of our tomatoes and basil and zucchini plants. They have been growing quite beautifully in our classroom and now it is time to take them outside for some blue sky and fresh air! Lets see what we can produce.

This last week we have been busy:
On Monday Sarah came in and we did some drama. Has your child talked about our little talent show?  Well Sarah has talked about doing a talent show/play...its a little bit of everything that the children have been working on with Sarah over the year. She is writing a little script that showcases all the drama activities, yoga and talents that we have practiced. Sarah is amazing at creating fun and dramatic games for the children. We are using our Mondays to practice some activities and then in June we will be inviting all the parents for a little showing of our talents.

On Wednesday we were introduced to our new classroom pets. Our little butterfly caterpillars have arrived. WE took a look at the Painted Lady caterpillar, just a little look as we will be starting the study of butterflies and caterpillars next week. They had just hatched from the eggs when we received them and they are sitting in a container of honeysuckle paste (that will be their food till they become a chrysalis). On Wednesday we wrote all that we knew about butterflies and then drew and painted beautiful butterflies. The children are very excited about our next unit of study. Can you believe that we are in the middle of May already? And that there is only a month and a half left??? Time flies when you are having fun.

On Thursday we joined Ms. Whitelaw in the library for another wonderful Steve Jenkins book...it was the Bones book. We looked at different animals bones...and how their different bones helped them do what they needed to do. A rabbits long foot bone helps it jump...and so on. Then after the children got to pretend they were on a archaelogical dig and see if they could predict what animal they were digging out by pulling out separate paper bones. We are enjoying our collaborative effort with Ms. Whitelaw and are especially enjoying our Steve Jenkins books. We have just finished our art project on Creature Features and a big thank you to Eli J. Who ordered a book from Scholastic and shared it with the class.

On Friday we had a very full day. It started with a presentation from the Vancouver City. It was a funny play called "Clean up your Act". The slapstick comedy talked about the importance of recycling, littering and about doing graffiti. After this we joined our buddy class and talked about sports day and sportsmanship. Yes, next Friday is Sports Day. If you are not going to be here next Friday, please let me know as I will be making up the teams on Monday. I will be giving them their colour. I asked them what colour they had been already so that I dont give them the same colour again. Friday's sports day will go rain or shine..lets hope it will be shine! The children love this day. More information will come out as the week progresses.
If you would like to join us on this day, you are more than welcome. 

For art we did Ben's FAVORITE are project EVER...and it was our abstract Miro project. Every year to honour sports day we do our stick figure paintings. For some reason this is a favorite of many children. You will see them adorning our walls very soon and then see why it is not only Ben's but others as well.

With that...
Have a great day...
we have a busy week of math, reading and writing ahead of us...hopefully we will have a healthy bunch of children with no chicken pox or any other "interesting" rashes.
Take care,
Teri

We asked the Mandrill and three other animals some interesting questions...the children answered for them and then did these colourful pictures in the style of Steve Jenkins.

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 Hey vulture...why don't you have feathers on your face??? That is the question asked of the vulture.

Whenever we start a new subject area, we talk about prior knowledge..what do we already know.

Our beautiful butterflies adorn our wall.

After reading Franklin's story....about being a team player, we brainstormed phrases that we can say during sports day to cheer each other on! Then did cute pictures of ourselves on sports day!

If we say all these wonderful things we will have a great sports day!!

Happy Mother's Day to all the wonderful women in our lives!!!
I hope everyone has a great day with their families!!
We had a great week planning and creating and writing and drawing all for our mamas. We read many stories. We talked about our moms and discussed how many things our mamas do for us. They really LOVE you!
I hope you get the opportunity to come into the school and read what they wrote about you. They also drew some beautiful pictures that will bring a smile to your face.
I have nothing more to add except that you are loved, appreciated and valued!
Enjoy your day together!!
Teri

We had an Earthquake drill on Thursday. Prior to that we discussed it and wrote about what we do.

The beautiful cards that we made for our mommas!

Playing on Friday!

Lego fun!

Good Morning Everyone,
What a lovely weekend of sunshine it was. I hope everyone played outside and soaked in the beautiful rays! With the sunny weather arriving (and hopefully staying) please remember to send your child with a water bottle that they can have on their desks, and take it home every so often to wash it. Having the water bottle on the desks eliminates the need to go looking for that water fountain that actually works. Our school just doesnt seem to have a great fountain. It is also the time to start putting on some sunscreen onto their little faces and the backs of their neck to help prevent them feeling all sick and woozy in class! (as well as burnt)

This past week we celebrated our volunteers with a cute song...it was great to see so many of our parents there, enjoying the celebration as well as the banana goodies that the staff made for you. We do appreciate you all very much!

We also said good bye to our spuds in tubs...they are now residing next door at the church where they will grow big and strong and before you know it we will be harvesting our spuds and having a spud feast. Thank you to everyone who said they would help and thank you to Eli J's dad (Mark) who did move them to our spot at the church. Everyone is more than welcome to go and take a look at how our garden is growing. The children know where it is.

The grade ones (cooking group A) in celebration of our spuds made latkes with the cooking moms. The children loved them soooo much that we will make latkes again next week. Latkes are a traditional food that Jewish people eat during Hannukah. This year we missed out on making them in December, so we made them now. I have to say, Mr. T sure loved them, likely as much as the children did!!

This last week had us talking more about weather. We finished our art on rain, we wrote weather reports on "different" kinds of weather....based on the humourous story cloudy with a chance of meatballs and we talked about the water cycle. We certainly could all become weather reporters now! We are very informed. Sarh (our Yoga, drama volunteer) will also be doing more weather skits with the children as we work towards our end of the year talent show!

Next week is the start of our tennis lessons. If you have not sent your tennis forms in yet, please do so.
Also if you are interested in having a hotdog on sports day, please send in your form as well. The hotdogs are optional.

With that, have a great Sunday. I will see everyone on Monday. Enjoy the delightful pictures!
teri

What is the weather like today??? Read some hilarious weather reports!

Big Rain coming! or better known as Dancing in the rain!!

An Aboriginal story about waiting for the rain to come!

And finally after a long, hard week, fun filled Friday has arrived!!!

Brody takes a look at all the information on what a seed needs to grow!