Terry Fox and Fine Motor Centres

With our upcoming Terry Fox run room 10 has been talking a great deal about Terry Fox. The students completed a journal picture of Terry Fox and included words that the class felt described him the best. Some of the words we felt fit Terry Fox were: runner, brave, cancer, Hero, robot leg, kind, caring, inspire, young, Canada, strong and never give up.

Dear Parents,

We wanted to give you a couple updates about the Terry Fox Run tomorrow. The current weather forecast is calling for 4°C and a light rain at the start of the run. Terry Fox ran through incredible adversity, including days upon days of adverse weather. It is our goal to continue the run unless field conditions become unsafe for our staff and students. Depending on the amount of rain falling at the time of the run we will likely consider a shorter time period outside. Please ensure students come dressed appropriately for this event. We plan to start running around 11:00 AM.

This year the Terry Fox Run takes on special importance to the Maple Ridge School Community. One of our new Kindergarten students has been through a multi-year battle with cancer. He is currently fighting one of his most difficult battles to date against a disease that does not discriminate against gender, race or age. Tomorrow, as a school, we will be running for Max. Despite the fact that most of our staff and students have never met him, I can attest to his incredible spirit, determination and courage. To our school community he exemplifies the very characteristics that made Terry Fox a hero for a nation.

To read more about Max’s story, his family has indicated you are welcome to visit his Facebook page at www.facebook.com/maxoneinamillion/.

Students are encouraged to bring Toonies to school tomorrow in our annual efforts to support the Terry Fox Foundation and the work they do in supporting cancer research. Donations can also be made directly through the organization’s website by clicking here. Your support is greatly appreciated.

Sincerely,

Brad Emery, Principal

Fine Motor Centres: This week as students arrive into the classroom they are greeted with Fine Motor Centres. We are working on strengthening all the little muscles in our hands and fingers so that we can continue to be amazing writers. Did you know that the human hand has 29 major and minor bones, 34 muscles which move the fingers and thumb, 17 muscles in the palm of the hand and 18 muscles in the forearm! 

Inventing Colour!

Room 10 scientists became "colourologists" for the day! They were given the three primary colours (Red, Blue and Yellow) as well as black and white with a task of creating new colours that consist of interesting names. The student's enjoyed mixing and exploring with colour, tint and shade creating some crayon worthy shades. Some of the creative names chosen were "bath tube", "the wind", "masi yellow", "grey clay", "Pikachu", "silver tooth", "orange fever", "banana grahams", "yellow sun", "baby yellow", "night", "boar breath", "bomb", "ultimate vampire", "steel", "super black", "caught back" and "zombie water". Look out crayola room 10 has some new colours in town!

*Important information*
Terry Fox run is this Friday at 11:00. Please wear red Maple Ridge t-shirt if you have one.
Birthday celebrations: because of allergies we ask that students bring in a favourite book and a show and tell item to share with the class if they would like. We strongly discourage treats and candy just to be cautious of allergies and sensitivities.

Learning about Colour and the Scientific Process

Room 10 has been studying color for the past couple of weeks. Today we were excited to learn about the Scientific Process through a really cool colour experiment. We learned about how each different stage in the scientific process is very important. The stages that we learned about were: Question, Hypothesis,  Materials, Observation, and Conclusion. Our colour experiment involved putting a few drops of food colouring into a plate of milk and then touching the food colour with a Q-tip dipped in dish soap. We were super surprised and excited to see what happened. Here are some pictures of the reaction that happened.

Mandalas

Some of the students in grade 1 have been studying patterns. We looked at some very complex and intricate mandala designs to help us explore pattern and shape more deeply. The students decided that the commonalities of the mandalas that we looked at were: they are a circular shape, they are made up of patterns and they have a centre point that draws your eye in. The students in room 9 and 10 were given many different beautiful materials to build their mandalas following the three criteria that we agreed upon. They created many beautiful images here is just a few!

 We then took our work to our outdoor classroom to explore with making mandalas with nature materials. It was trickier to find things that were different shapes and colours but we were able to and once again made some beautiful images that we left as a gift for the people that us this space.

International Dot Day!

Sunday September 15th is International Dot Day! This day is inspired from the children's book the Dot written by Peter Reynolds. This is a story about a girl who thinks that she can not draw. Her teacher encourages her to draw a dot and sign her work. From there she sees herself as an artist and a whole new world opens up to her. We have been practicing the Dot song written by Emily Arrow. Click on the link and check it out!

All about your child

Today I sent home a sheet with some questions telling me all about your child and your hopes and goals for this year. This is what we will be talking about next week at parent/teacher conferences, just thought we would send them home so that you have some time to think about the questions.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Learning About Colour

Room 10 has been learning about colour by exploring primary and secondary colors. Today we read the story Mouse Paint by Ellen Still Walsh and were inspired to try colour mixing ourselves. We used primary colours and our fingers to mix secondary colours on a paper plate. We discovered that red and yellow make orange, blue and yellow make green, red and blue make purple and if you mix them all together you get mud (brown)!

Exploring with Story Workshop

In room 10 we learn through a process called Story Workshop. Story Workshop consists of time for students to explore different materials, document or capture their work, share their work and revisit their work. Students are provided with different provocations during explore time. Some examples are creating buildings with large blogs, telling stories with collage materials, using recycled materials to create simple machines/inventions and experimenting with many different art Techniques. Through the documenting and capturing component, students are building their technology, literacy and looking closely skills by sketching, photographing or using the iPAD to document their thinking. They then have the opportunity to practice their oral language skills by presenting their work to peers and receiving positive and helpful feedback. All of the components of Story Workshop provide the students with the opportunity to learn skills such as reading, writing, drawing and presenting in a meaningful and impactful way. Take a look at what we have been up to during Story Workshop this week!

Today in Room 10!

We started off the morning with music class today. Then we were given a building challenge to build our own bubble wands. We discussed the materials that were available and the constraints such as tape being the only fastener available to us. Before we could test our wands we had to sketch a picture of it and label our work. Here is what we created!

We discovered that some of the materials worked better then others and that when the tape got wet it didn't stick well. One of our friends used one of the materials (cloths pin) to hold her bubble wand together and it worked great! Even though some of our wands didn't work as well as we had expected we still had fun using our hands to create different ways of making bubbles. 

*Remember Monday is picture day!!!!

Open House and Purple Folders

Remember tomorrow is our open house. Come meet me and check out our space. Oh, and don't forget to grab some yummy ice cream! 5:00-7:00 pm.

Purple Folders
Purple folders are coming home today. This is our way of sending papers, home reading books, forms... back and forth from school to home and home to school. Please, please send them with your child daily as they will be collected each morning.

Paint Shirts

Hi room 10 families! If you are able could everyone send in an old mens dress shirt to use as paint/messy art shirts in our classroom please. I would hate for all the kids beautiful cloths to get dirty!

First Day in Room 10!

We had a fun and exciting first day in room 10! We starting the day with engaging in some different exploration centres such as small building, painting, scientific sketching, collage and wire, stick and clay art. We then read out morning message and story followed by snack and recess. After recess Mrs. McCaw challenged us to explore with straws, water and soap. We created really cool bubbles. We looked at natural occurring bubbles and brainstormed where we have seen bubbles. One of our friends taught us that Surfing Snails create bubbles to help them float! Some things we know about bubbles are: water makes bubbles, force of water or air can make bubbles, animals make bubbles, and air make bubbles. Some of our theories about how bubbles are formed were "the air is grabbing the soap", "the air is pulling the soap up", "the air is rolling the soap". We learned that bubbles are made of many layers air and water/soap mixture, water particles are attacked to each other but when you add soap it makes spaces between the particles, all bubbles are a round shape even if you use a different shaped wand because the water particles are a "little" attracted to each other. In the afternoon we read a story and drew how we were feeling in our journals. Then we had some explore time. It was a super busy but fun day!