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.
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!
Since the beginning of school, our teacher has been doing Wonder Wednesday with us. On these days, we start by looking at a picture from the internet, usually from the Wonderopolis website. Then we spend a few minutes recording our thoughts, ideas, and wonders in our Wonder Journal. We write questions we have, observations we make and what we think the picture is. We can share our ideas using sentences or pictures. After that, we share our ideas with our classmates for a few minutes. Finally, our Wonder Wednesday time ends with our teacher showing us the question, information and video related to that Wonder. Doing Wonder Wednesday helps us to be more curious, which is one of the Classroom Habitudes we've been talking about. We have even started a "Wonder Wall" in our classroom, where we can post any wonder that we have.
Here are the wonders we've done so far this year.
The first week's picture...
Here is what some of us wrote about this picture...
What did you wonder about when you saw those pictures?
What's something that you're curious about? What question would you want to put on our Wonder Wall?
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"?
