I wanted to give you a heads up regarding the Terry Fox Walk on Friday. It's important to me that when students participate in events like this, we do our best to give them context and meaning. I read a picture book biography of Terry Fox in class today. Many students had never heard of Terry Fox and weren't quite sure what our special event on Friday was all about.
At the same time, Terry's story has a lot of sadness in it, which can be difficult for young students to deal with. I try to focus on the message of hope and his sense of determination, but you may be having conversations at home tonight that echo our conversation today at school.
We also tried to wrap our heads around the fact that Terry Fox ran every day for months and that he ran over 5, 000 km. Many students had visited Ottawa or Montreal, so we used those as reference points and spent some time looking at a map like this one.
Kindergarten students will be walking around the track 5 times on Friday, which equals 1 kilometre. We're attempting to place that distance in context by looking at the metre stick and measuring ourselves. Most students are just over one metre tall and a kilometre is one thousand times that long. These are big numbers for kindergarten students.
To end, a picture: what I like about this is that it shows a long view. In the foreground, a student reads The Very Hungry Caterpillar in our library. In the midground, 3 students are making dinner in the kitchen. In the distance, you can see a bunch of boys comparing heights and measuring themselves against our wall chart. All are busy and engaged in learning.
Have a great week,
Lisa Goegan
