Good Morning Parents and children,
I hope you are enjoying a lovely fall weekend (a long weekend for all of you!) The wind was amazing! Driving home past English Bay on Friday was incredible. The waves were huge and the trees were bent sideways. I had to detour the whole edge of the city due to the climate change strike with Greta. I heard a few of our children were going. I would love to hear if you did! 
Thank you so much to all the parents who showed up and talked to me about their children. I love talking about your children, they are pretty special! Thank you for sharing your thoughts, your views on your children and the compliments. We are all having a marvelous time and I can see how hard you work with them at home. Keep it up. Keep reading and writing at home...all that helps when we do our activities in the classroom.
This week we will be enjoying Halloween Centres.
Halloween falls on Thursday this year, so leading up to it we will be doing some Halloween centres every afternoon. One of the things that i would like to do is an art project with small pumpkins...it's called Kandinsky Pumpkins. For this I will need everyone to bring in a very small pumpkin...no bigger than a cabbage. We will not be carving them...just painting them. We will be doing this Tuesday afternoon, so please bring it in by then. Let me know if this is not possible for you. This year due to the space, we will not be doing a team carving activity in the gym. But we will be having a Halloween School costume march on the Thursday. So children are invited to wear their costumes to school on this day. Make note not to dress your child in a costume that is so precious that if it wrecks during play time at recess and lunch that they would be devastated. Make sure that the costume can be sat in at school as we still have a full day of classes. Also if you need to send some clothes for them to change into after our parade, then do that as well and they can change out of their costume. Thursday afternoon we will have a small party...doing arts and crafts....decorating some cookies that i will bring in and just having some free halloween play. If you would like to send in a little treat that's fine...but we will keep it on the down low as the rest of their night will be very exciting. 

On November 1st (Friday) the children will all be going to a Coyote presentation in the Gym. Due to our presence near the forest and the bog, we thought this would be a perfect opportunity to have some important information on how to identify a coyote and what to do if we see a coyote. Any parents who wish to join us are more than welcome! This will be in the morning at 900 am as part of our assembly.

Finally, the PAC has a popcorn machine. Each teacher is given two days to sign up to use the popcorn machine.All funds from the popcorn sales goes to our class for fieldtrips etc. Sarah (Neve's mom has said that she would do popcorn sales, but I need one more mom or dad to join her). Let me know if you can do a day or two. This is the link to sign up...but lets make sure we coordinate with Sarah first https://www.signupgenius.com/go/60b0e4ba5a628abf85-popcorn

And with that..have a great Sunday and enjoy the delightful pictures. The first set is when Carters's mom Jacqueline spent the afternoon planting tulip bulbs in the rain with the children and the second set was of our nature walk to the edge of the field to explore the changing colours of fall..we sketched the beautiful deciduous and coniferous trees...then the next day we came and played in the leaves and climbed the trees as well as looked at the mushrooms growing under them. What a beautiful place we live in!!
Teri

The first to start planting the tulips. We planted on the back half...then covered it with a blanket of leaves. The front half is reserved for Ms. Jung's class to plant daffodils. Wont this look beautiful in the Spring?

Today..such a different weather day...we sat under the beautiful trees..and around them to sketch.

Our very scarey scarecrow art.

And our beautiful pumpkins...pumpkins, pumpkins, i love pumpkins.

Our Classroom tree...it's leaves have turned colour!!!!

Good Morning and Happy Thanksgiving,
I hope everyone has had a great long weekend and has or will have a yummy Thanksgiving dinner full of thanks for their lovely families. Tonight is our big meal ...we held off till the "cook" (me) was feeling better...and I am thankful that I am!
I am thankful for the lovely class that I have been blessed with this year. My grade two's have all stepped up to the plate to be lovely leaders, patient and kind and my grade one's have proven to be so adaptable and flexible and ready to conquer any challenges. It is quite the transition to go from Kindergarten and a two month summer break to a grade one-two classroom where the expectations are higher, where they are encouraged to read, write and work in teams. And these grade ones certainly are embracing the power of learning! Thank you to the parents and to the grade 2's who are wonderful role models!

This last week we went outside and prepared our two garden beds for the winter. We drew what the garden beds looked before we weeded and got rid of all the old plants and then drew what our garden beds looked like after we transplanted our kale into one garden bed and got it ready for the winter.
To get a garden bed ready for the winter the children had to collect leaves and place all these little warm blankets around the feet of the kale.(the roots of the kale). These little nature blankets will keep the soil from eroding away with the rain and keep the roots nice and warm until the spring sun comes...the leaves will also start to decompose and add nutrition back into the soil. The other garden box will be left for our bulbs that we will be planting this week. 
During the cleaning of our garden boxes, the children discovered bugs, aphids, rolypoly's spiders, seed pods and many other exciting creatures. We were very lucky to have such a lovely day to do all of our exploring.Thank you Andrea for helping out!

Days to remember:
October 21st Individual Class photos
October 23rd and 24th Early Dismissal 145 for the Parent Teacher Conferences...if you havent sent me a text for a time, do so now
October 25th Professional Development Day...no school for children.

With that
have a great Monday and I will see you on Tuesday. Enjoy all the delightful pictures...if you press on one picture you can see the rest close up as you scroll through. Show your children...i told them i took tons of pictures for them to see.