Good afternoon!
We had a wonderful day today. We began with our classroom meeting. Today we played an energizer called “Arubisha!” The students begin by saying, “Arubisha, arubisha, arubisha shah!” then we add an action. For example, “Arubisha, arubisha, arubisha shah, hands on your head!” All the students repeat and perform the action before it passes to the next person. The next student gets to add a new action to the sequence. They might add, “Arubisha, arubisha, arubisha shah, hands on your head, touch your toes!” As you can imagine, the sequence of actions gets to be quite long before we come to the end of the group. After our energizer, we reviewed our 4 tribes agreements (right to pass, mutual respect, attentive listening, and appreciations – no put downs), and began our meeting. We had a suggestion in our classroom meeting folder that the students wanted to discuss today. During Math Centers, AGENDA, etc. or other times throughout the day when group work is going on or the students need to maintain focus, we write QUIET on the board. One student is given one of our whiteboard erasers and if the class becomes too loud, that student erases a letter. At the end of the day we add up the remaining letters for classroom rewards. This week we have been working towards extra DPA time. Each letter is worth 5 minutes, and we have earned 15 extra minutes of DPA for next week. The suggestion from the students that we discussed today was to have a way that students could earn the erased letters back. We discussed it as a class, with students sharing some positives and some possible negatives. Then we took a vote. The students voted in favour of using the new system. We then discussed what times of things THEY thought they would have to do in order to earn back letters. We came up with: quiet attentive listening during AGENDA, working together as a team during Centers or group work, lining up quietly in the hallways, and giving genuine appreciation statements during activities and group work. We have decided to use the new system for the next 2 weeks and then we will discuss the QUIET board again on our Oct. 4th meeting. We closed by having students answer the TRIBES question this week. This week we asked, “What was something new that you learned this week?” I heard a lot of answers about Wetlands, variables, equations, etc. It was wonderful to hear what some people learned about this week.
In Science today we began a small experiment. We have been discussing water sources and the importance of water. Today we discussed water pollution and how it can affect wetlands ecosystems. We have placed a white carnation in a container filled with pollution (green food colouring). On Monday we will be able to check our carnation and note the impact the pollution had on the plant. This will lead us to begin discussing cycles and food chains. Then, we went outside and cleaned up some pollution. We participated in Fall Cleanup, taking our yellow bag provided by the municipality outside to find some garbage on the school grounds. In the end we filled up at least 3/4 of our bag just in our designated area alone! Well done everyone!
In Art today we continued our discussion of colour by reviewing the primary and secondary colours. Students were then asked to paint with watercolours, using 2 primary colours. They painted from dark to light (changing the value of their colour), and they overlapped in the middle. We will be adding some dark silhouettes to the pictures next week. Check out some of our completed and works in progress below!
