The cat is out of the bag

Dear Parents,

The last day is always a blur, but all the facts are out there now:

I'll be teaching Grade 1 at IRC in September, Ms. Moniz will be teaching in Room 101, and you should have your class placements for September as well. I hope that you found report cards helpful in thinking about your child's learning.

I sent home a postcard (students chose their own image) with a little personalized note for each child on Tuesday, and Ms. Moniz sent home a little care package, with a math or language workbook and a bookmark, yesterday.

The last day is always a blur, especially while moving classrooms, so I did receive all your kind words and presents (homemade cards with kid notes are totally my favourite thing ever), but didn't have a chance to write personalized thank you notes in return.

Still, I hope it was a great last day for the kids: we spent a good chunk of our morning having a picnic with our reading buddies and the afternoon playing with building toys and reminiscing about our year together. The Earth Rangers assembly and our farm trip were highlights for students.

I hope you have a fantastic summer.
Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan

Translated into standard english: You're the best teacher ever. I learned a lot from you. You know you confuse me sometimes, but otherwise, you're great. I like you, Ms. Goegan and I still will always. 

Picnic Tomorrow and Assembly Friday

Dear Parents,

We look forward to welcoming you tomorrow for our picnic. If you are coming early to help set up, please arrive by 12:30 in the Kinder Yard. This should give us enough time to set up and get you good seats before the music presentation starts.

If you are bringing food, please make sure your containers are clearly labelled with last name and room number.

In the event of rain, we've decided it makes sense to have the entire event in the gym rather than asking you to take another day off work at the last minute. We hope you'll work with us to make this work, in case it's necessary.

We also hope to have enough helpers to make clean up a smooth process at the end of the day. Thanks in advance for helping us make this happen.

In addition, on Friday, there's a whole school assembly that should start at 9 am. If you're available to come early, meet us in the big yard for a special musical experience.

It's been a lovely year and a pleasure teaching all of your children (Some of them for two years!). Next year will be an adventure for us all in new classrooms, but I will be looking with interest to see how things continue to develop.

Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan

Field trip

Dear Parents,

This week Felix's mom has been in to teach us about clouds. You may have wondered about the white crepe paper many students came home with yesterday. Those were cirrus clouds, those pale streaky ones that travel high in the atmosphere.  We also learned about cumulus clouds, which are fluffy, and cumulo-nimbus clouds, which are definite signs of rain. We read a short story called Cloudette.

Cirrus clouds running around

Pretending to be cirrus clouds under a cloudless sky

Fluffy cumulus clouds gathering rain

Today was our field trip to Black Creek community farm. There were four different activities over the course of the day: A nature craft with found objects. A scavenger hunt where students made bracelets with beads representing the 5 things plants need and took home little sprouting seeds on strings around their necks. A chance to weigh and collect eggs, and commune with the farm's chickens. A hike through the local woods and a chance to wish on the Wishing Tree. I didn't take out my camera as much as I should have, but I hope to get some photos back from the other groups.

The homemade pizza and salad lunch was also delicious.

Thanks again to the Ah-Maz-Ing parent volunteers who came along and just had a great time with the kids.

Butterflies and other natural wonders

 Last week was chock full of nature. First, we found this guy in the school yard, ready for his close up.

 He was really quite social.

Just hanging out

 I've been using this Caterpillar Identification Guide with students, which leads me to suspect that this guy was a Mourning Cloak butterfly. We soon set him down amidst the greenery to make his way in the world.

But in the classroom, we discovered many of our Painted Lady chrysalids had hatched.

The muconium was a little gory, but the butterflies were happily flying about.

 Even a couple we had lost hope of because they'd fallen, hatched, albeit with broken wings.

Here I am trying to set it free. 

Meanwhile, we had the Earth Rangers presentation in the gym.

Water Monitor Lizard

Prehensile tailed Porcupine

Raptor

There was also a skunk, but I failed to get any pictures of him because I was overwhelmed with the cuteness. (Apologies on dereliction of duty there). Students were encouraged to visit the Earth Rangers site, which is actually full of great information and games for kids, as well as encouraging them to fundraise for animal conservation. Here's the Earth Rangers site, so you can visit together with your child if you like. We were also happy because Henry joined us for this presentation.

 Later that week, we took our butterflies out to set them free. At first I put the butterflies on the nearby tree

 But they were sitting for a while and not flying away, so I started putting them on student shoulders and heads, so they could move around a bit with the butterflies. Things evolved from there.

Butterfly on his hat is a little hard to see

 There were a lot of butterflies

"They're so ticklish"

This student preferred to hold the butterfly on a stick

 (I did do my best to get photos of everyone with the butterflies, but some students were also very not interested. )

A rare smile caught in the wild

 They hung around for quite a bit, but eventually many of them flew away.

 And at the end of the day, there were just a few more new ones hatched, so our experts got to share with their parents as well.