High Park Nature Centre

Dear Parents, 

It was a great day for a field trip. We spent some time inside learning to look at nature with new eyes and then took a brief walk in the woods to hang our bird feeders and look for animal signs. On the way home, we spent some time in Lithuania Park, where many of the students built nests on the hillside and enjoyed outdoor play. 

Two of the stations involved matching cards. One was a game of concentration where students matched birds, and the other was a 3 way match between an animal, a picture of its tracks and a photo of its actual tracks in the wild. 

The next favourite involved using lard to pack a pinecone and then rolling it in seeds as a natural birdfeeder. 

 

Then, students practiced making a variety of animal tracks and guessing what animal matched each others' efforts.

 

 The favourite station, as always, was making another type of animal sign: scat (really just playdough with cocoa powder in it). Students guessed what type of scat each person decided to make.

 We played another matching game outside, before our hike, while we listened to see if the birds were coming for the feeders. When we finally returned for lunch, we actually saw a woodpecker for a while. It was kind of magical.

After lunch, we headed back up towards the school, walking this time, and stopped at Lithuania Park for a while to play and explore. There was hay in the park that some students used to make bird's nests for themselves, while others played on the play structure or rolled down the hill. 

This student found some twine and made an impromtu fishing rod

 Just before we left, we took a class photo (Staring into the sunlight seemed better than being backlit at the time).

Field Trip Reminder

Dear Parents,

Just a brief reminder that we'll be off on our field trip next Monday morning. This is a half day trip, but students should pack a lunch and we'll see if we can eat there or al fresca, depending on the weather and take our time coming home.

For those who haven't been in the classroom lately, we've been working to talk about characteristics of living things, human, plant and animal. After setting the prompt, "What do we already know about animals?" Students drew these drawings. It's always interesting to see what they put in and what they leave out. Hearts, bones, genitals, and brains made it into all these pictures, but lungs, stomachs, and other organs did not. These pictures and the ensuing discussion gave me starting points for teaching.

 As always, I try to ask what kids are wondering about. Students are curious about how brains work and about the special features of animals, so that also helps give our unit a focus.

We're continuing to work on animal projects and I've also brought a number of non-fiction books about animals into the classroom to support our investigation. We've been talking about the features of these books, like Tables of Content, Indexes, Glossaries, Labelled Diagrams, Maps, and even Photo captions. 

As we move into spring, Non-fiction investigations will continue to be a focus of our language program as well. 

Interview problem solving and printmaking

Dear Parents,

This is a crazy week with Hundredth Day, Valentines and Report interviews all stacked, as well as the beginning of Lent (Shrove Tuesday, Ash Wednesday) and a flu rampaging through the school. Please note that if your child was absent today, their Valentines have been collected and are waiting for them. I also have a couple of report cards still to go home that are hanging out in our Mr. Zippy bin.

With all that said, I'll be absent during the day tomorrow and returning to the school at 4pm to do interviews.

Because of daycare's presence in our room, I'll be doing interviews in Room 202, upstairs across from the library.

I sent home interview confirmations today, but I can see that they'd be easy to miss in the pile of Valentines today. I should have access to email, if you'd like to book an appointment. You can also look directly at my schedule in google calendar and book yourself in by following this link:

February appointments


While I'm blogging, I thought I'd also show you some process and results of our recent printmaking work.

Students created an image then traced it onto a styrofoam plate. 

The image was taped to avoid movement

Once the cover was revealed, students had a workable template to print from

An iguana

A woodpecker

A rhinoceros

An owl

 Here are some of the results:

A manta ray

A loon

A puffer fish

And here's the class display, showing a variety of prints.