Mrs. Braybrook Has Moved!

Our teacher, Mrs. Braybrook, has moved to a new job in our school, so she is no longer our teacher.  Mrs. Vasseur is our new teacher and she has just started a blog.  Now you can keep up with our learning by visiting Vasseur's Voracious Learners.

Halloween Fun

Like most other classrooms, we celebrated Halloween last Friday.  We did a spelling activity where we took the word "Halloween" and had to use the letters from that word to make as many other words as possible.  Some of the words we found were: all, we, on, no, owl, howl, whole, when, hall

We also explored the wonder -- Why Do You Say "Trick or Treat"? from Wonderopolis.  It was surprising to find out that we've been saying that for a long time!  In the video, it talks about the fundraiser that UNICEF does at Halloween to help children around the world.  Some students in our class and our school also participate in the We Scare Hunger campaign through Free the Children.  They collect non-perishable food for our Santa's Anonymous Program.  Last year, students from our school collected over 1000 pounds of food!

A couple of our local police officers also visited our classroom on Halloween morning.  They reminded us about Halloween safety and gave us special lit up bracelets for us to wear out trick or treating so we could be more easily seen.

Of course, Halloween wouldn't be complete without costumes...check ours out...

Halloween was also a bit of a special day for us too because we got to meet Mrs. Vasseur.  Our teacher, Mrs. Braybrook, is going to be doing a different job in our school and Mrs. Vasseur is going to be our new teacher.  You can see them both dressed up in their costumes in this picture...

In the afternoon, we got to watch a movie with some of the other classes.  We sure laughed a lot!

Photo Credit: IMDb

And that is how we celebrated Halloween at school this year.

We were wondering...

What did you dress up as?
How did you celebrate?

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?

Marty Chan Author Visit

We enjoyed a visit from author Marty Chan this afternoon.  He is from Alberta and writes books for kids.  We also found out that he writes plays and stuff for radio and television too.  He was a very funny presenter.  He told us that he likes to write about things that happened to him as a kid.

In his first series, he chose to write mystery books because he liked reading the Hardy Boys mystery books when he was a kid.  His first books were this series of mystery novels:

Photo Credit: Carr McLean

Our teacher is reading the "Mystery of the Cyber Bully" in class during snack times to us.  In the book, there is a scene where the kids are tossing around a bunch of back packs.  Cheyanne asked him if that really happened to him.  He told us no, that part didn't happen, but he made it up to include in the book.

One of our classmates even got to help him act out a scence from one of his books!  In this scene, our classmate is throwing a ball in a game of Dodgeball at Mr. Chan.

He then told us about the second series he is writing.  This series is all about a sasquatch.  He has always been interested in learning more about legends of creatures like sasquatch, so he decided to write this series.

Photo Credit: CanLit for LittleCanadians

As he was telling us about his interest in these creatures, he showed us a replica of something that was found.  In this video, you can see him showing it to us.  Some of us were too freaked out to watch him reveal it!

He told us about a time when he went camping with a friend and his friend's Dad really spooked them out that there was a sasquatch in the area they were camping in.  He had gotten up during the night and tripped on something in the dark.  In the morning, when he looked at what he had tripped on, it was a great big footprint.  He had it made into a mold and this is what it looked like:

He ended his presentation by having a few people from our audience work with him to tell a story -- it was very entertaining!

Mr. Chan has also written a funny picture book about his cats.  Our teacher read it to us this week. 

Photo Credit: Canadian Review of Materials

Our teacher was looking around his website and found that he has some tips for students when they write.  You can check it out here.

We were wondering...

Have you read any books by Marty Chan?
What authors have you heard speak?