We Are "Fabulish"!

We are really enjoying our Peter Reynolds author study as part of the Global Read Aloud.  This week's book was "Ish".



Photo Credit: 101 Picture Books

In this book, the main character, Ramon, loved to draw...anytime, anything, anywhere.  But he got discouraged when his older brother laughed at his drawings and asked what they were.  Ramon started working harder to make his pictures "just right" but he usually failed at it, so he would crumple up his work.  His younger sister came along and rescued them and taught Ramon that his drawings were "ish" and how to love them again.

Here is a video of somone reading the book, so you'll understand the story:

 

We had our Family Wellness Worker, Miss Joy, come and do a lesson with us.  She loves this book and it's message...how we all have "ish" qualities.  She also shared the inspiring story of two brothers (Connor and Cayden) and how Connor appreciates his brother's "ish" qualities.  Here's the video of these two brothers:

 

Then it was time for us to think about our "ish" qualities.  Miss Joy gave each of us a sheet that looked like this:

We had to put our name on the top line and then complete the sentence by writing on the bottom lines about what makes us fablous...although we changed the 'ous' to 'ish' to make the word "fabulish". 

The next step was to tape the paper to our backs.  We then went around to as many classmates as we could and wrote something on their paper that we thought made them "fabulish".  No one could look at their own paper though because it was taped to our backs.  Here are some pictures of us doing the activity:

Finally, when the time was up, we took our paper off of our backs and read what our classmates had written about what makes us "fabulish".  It was so amazing to see our page filled with comments from our classmates!

Here are some completed pages...just look at all of those comments!

We are also a bucket filling school and this activity really helped everyone to fill each other's bucket (and our own!)

We were wondering...

What makes you "fabulish"?
What are other ways to celebrate your "ish" qualities?

Global Read Aloud -- Week 1

It was exciting to start the Global Read Aloud this week!  Our class is doing the author study using books by Peter H. Reynolds.  The book we studied this week was "North Star". 

In this story, a young boy is on a journey and there are many different paths to follow.  It reminded us that we need to follow our own path to reach our dreams.  We also talked about how the boy had to show many of the "classroom habitudes" that we've been learning about -- courage, adaptability, curiosity, self-awareness.

You can read the story online by clicking here. 


Photo Credit: Peter H. Reynolds website

What's really cool about participating in the Global Read Aloud, is that there are other classrooms all over the world who are also reading the same books.  Our teacher has buddied up with a grade 4 class in Illinois.  This week, we worked together to share what the book means to us.  We all posted our responses on this Padlet wall.  (Some of the posts cover other posts.  If you click on a post, you will see black/yellow arrows in the top right hand corner that you can use to scroll through each person's post.)  It was a pretty cool way to connect with the other students about this book.

We were wondering...

Have you read any of Peter H. Reynolds' books?
After you've read the book (using the link above), what would you say the book means to you?

We'd love it if you left us a comment sharing your ideas!

Celebrating International Dot Day (Week)

We were so surprised when we got to our classroom this past Monday morning.  Our teacher had done a little redecorating over the weekend.  This is what our door looked like...

 There were also balloons and a tablecloth...

We started the day by watching a video of the book "The Dot" by Peter H. Reynolds.

We talked about the message behind this story and how Vashti showed many different habitudes...imagniation, courage, passion, perseverance, self-awareness and adaptability.  That was almost all of them!

Throughout the week, we did many different "dot" activities in all of our subjects.  In math, we were given the challenge to write as many fact families as we could.  Some students challenged themselves by writing fact families with bigger numbers and some even did multiplying and dividing fact families.  Here are some pictures to show you some students' work... (Sorry for the sideways pictures)

In math, we also did dot to dots to practice skip counting, drew pictures of equal groups (circles with dots on them) to practice multiplication and the best math activity was doing some graphing using packages of Skittles.  The best part was eating our dot candy after our work was done!  (Oops...our teacher forgot to take pictures of this!)

Since our school and classroom try to be "bucket fillers", we also spent some time brainstorming ideas for what "bucket fillers" and "bucket dippers" do.  Here are some of our ideas...

 On Thursday afternoon, we really had a chance to "make our mark".  Our town is updating some playgrounds and we were invited to come and help!  It was so much fun to help out in our community and we can't wait to play there when it's done!

We started with a safety meeting with one of the town employees.

 

Then it was time to get to work!  We had to place these big black Lego-type pieces around the park.  They weren't heavy, but were kind of awkward to carry.

 

After our work was done, we sat and watched the cement truck and adult volunteers do the cement work.

 

The town was kind enough to even buy Tim Horton's Smile Cookies and water for us as a treat and a way to say thank you!

 



 

The hard working "Braybrook's Bunch".

 

In art, we did a couple of different "dot" projects.  For the first one, everyone designed and colored a dot.  Then, everyone's dots were cut into 4 pieces and each piece was put with 3 other students' work to create a collaborative dot masterpiece!  Check them out...

 



For the second art project, we learned about Kandinsky and his piece called "Color Study of Squares with Concentric Circles".  This video helped us understand how to do the project.

It was finally time for us to try it on our own.  We just nicely got started today, so we will have to work on them more next week.  They are looking pretty impressive so far!

To end the week, told us about a song that has been written to go with this book.  We read the lyrics and then enjoyed singing it together.

It was such a wonderful week celebrating!

We were wondering...

How did you (or how could you) celebrate International Dot Day?
How will you "make your mark"?