Vow of Silence

"We won’t stand by while children are subjected to exploitation, poverty and the denial of their basic rights. Every day, millions of children are silenced by these abuses. But we can take a stand for children everywhere."
-http://www.freethechildren.com/vowofsilence/

I got an email last night explaining to me that one of the students in our Me to We Club, Madeline, was going to take the Vow of Silence today. I was impressed because this seems like a very difficult task for a young student. When we were at We Day, one of the speakers was participating in the vow and did his entire speach with posters. The entire crowd of 16 000 children and teachers was silent. Absolutely silent. It was moving.
Today Kaitlin came to school and had decided to take the Vow of Silence. As she came in silently, other students were wondering what she was doing. Some thought it was silly and others jumped on board with her right away. Kaitlin's brother is a part of a Free the Children Club at his school and many of the students in our class are a part of our Me to We Club. After the Vow of Silence was explained to the class and we watched a short video clip about it, 22 out of our 26 kids are participating (and 2 are absent!). Next door in Mrs. Tresoor's room the exact same thing is happening.
Awesome.



"The Vow of Silence is Free The Children’s annual awareness-raising campaign that engages tens of thousands of participants to stand up for children whose rights are not being upheld."
-http://www.freethechildren.com/vowofsilence/

Student Blogs on Kidblog

Today we were finally able to get started on our student blogs and everyone is excited! The student's first posts were their weekly TWAS tasks. Among other posts, we will write our TWAS as blog posts instead of paper letters. Parents, friends and family members are asked to respond to TWAS as a blog comment istead of writing a comment in your child's duotang as in the past.
You can view all of our student blogs by visiting www.kidblog.org/mrsdentscarcellosclass/. This link is also posted on this blog along the right-hand side and is called "Student Blogs".
We look forward to your comments!
-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

More Time Chilling With Nanuq!

Today was one of those days that remind me why I love being a teacher.

We tuned in to Edmodo and Polar Bear International's webcast live from Churchill hosted by our new friend Andy McKiel. You could have heard a pin drop in this room if it weren't for the scratching of pencils on paper as the students madly wrote their facts and reflections about what they were learning. Everyone was totally engaged in the webcast and the learning that happened, the discussions that were sparked, was priceless. I have included some snaps of our reflections and discoveries that were recorded during the webcast in the animoto below. I wish I could post them all! Some kids even filled the back side of their paper, it was like their little minds were exploding with new information! This week we will be starting inquiry projects about severe weather and climate change, I am guessing there will be a lot of inquiring around our fresh interest in the Greenhouse Effect!
After watching the webcast, we read some of Andy's blog posts from his experience (awesome) and talked about his question, "If polar bears could talk, what would they say?" We also read "Winston of Churchill" which shares a lot of "polar bear opinion" to get our minds working. We had some great ideas about what polar bears would say and extended that to explain WHY they would say it. We posted our ideas as comments on Andy's blog and he replied to all of our questions! Check out our ideas and his responses.

Here are some of our facts, reflections, thoughts and sketches from what we learned today:

The topic of the webcast today was "Polar Detectives: Living In A Sustainable World" which talked a lot about climate change, fitting perfectly into the end of our weather exploration in Science! Below is the recording from today's webcast. Skip ahead to 9:25 for the beginning of the webcast. All of the webcasts from this week are embedded in the video page of Andy's blog if you would like to take a look.

The song that plays as you wait for the webcast to start is "The Polar Bear Song/Bjorn's Song":

Webcast (skip ahead to 9:25):

Watch live streaming video from tundraconnections at livestream.com

 

It was a great day in grade 5!

-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Skyping with Mrs.Malkoske's class :)

Today we tried out Skype for the first time as a class. We had a call with Mrs. Malkoske's grade 1 and 2 class down the road at Dr. Hamilton School. We are going to Skype regularly as reading buddies for Read to Someone during our Daily 5 time. After we all had our chance to see what Skype is all about, Rachel and Ricky had a chance to read to two students in their class. I love using Skype in this way whether it is with same-age students or Little Buddies like this. The students are totally engaged in it and able to model being good readers for the youngsters.
-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Today I was the first person to skype with Mrs.Malkoske's class. I skyped with Jayden, I read her If You Give A Mouse A Cookie and she read Dolphins. I think both books were awesome!It was pretty fun being the first one to skype with someone. This was my first time. I hope I will get to skype with her again.

BY:Rachel :P

Congratulations!

At Bird's Hill School we participate in the Boston Pizza Home Reading Program. If students read at least 20 times for at least 20 minutes, they get a free kids meal at Boston Pizza! Thanks to Ms. Wasney for coordinating this for us.
Congratulations to the following students who got kids meals for their October reading:
Rachelle
Matt
Kirstyn
Kaitlin
Jada
Ashleigh
Jessica
Maxel Mae (who read so much she could have earned 3 meals!!)
Emily
Nick S.

Way to go and keep reading in November!

Chilling With Nanuq

A digital friend of mine, Andy McKiel, has been invited to join an amazing adventure. He has travelled to Churchill, Manitoba to spend a week studying polar bears and their habitat. He will be working along with Edmodo, Polar Bears International and a team of scientists from around the world to share the fall polar bear migration with the rest of the world!
This adventure started on the weekend and today they will start broadcasting at 12:00 CST. We will be following his adventures through his blog at http://chillingwithnanuq.blogspot.com/ which includes his stories, photos and the video feed.
Andy will answer any of our questions as we leave them as comments on his blog.
Enjoy :)
-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Rememberance day

Today Nov 10 we had our Remembrance Day assembly.  Before we started we sang O Canada and had a minute of silence.  We had 4 special guests.  We had 3 veterans and one lady named Angie that was alive during world war II.  She told us about when she was a little girl in grade 5 and about all the war an bombs.  She was on the Holland side and against the Germans.  One day the Germans put her in jail.Then we sang a song called Thank a Vet and bless our troops with the whole school. The grade 2’s and 3’s gave postcards to the 3 veterans.  After the grade 4’s sang a song.  Then our class helped clean up the gym and put the chairs away.  Our Remembrance Day assembly was great.  
Emily and Rachel. 

Peace Feels Like

This month the students in our school all read "What Does Peace Feel Like" by Vladimir Radunsky to start conversations about peace. The book discusses what peace feels like, looks like, sounds like, smells like with ideas from children.

Many classes also created art work for Remembrance Day. Here is a video of our art for the Remembrance Day assembly.

Plastic Bag Roundup Final Count

Are totall of plastic bag is 9410 plasic bags. I wish we could get more plastic bags but it is over so we can'tget more. If we reched are plastic bag gole of 10,00 plastic bags we mit get the plastic bag bench.It dupens if we have more plastic bags then some school. I think even if we dont get the plastic bench we can
-Kirstyn

Grade 5 did an amzing job with the Plastic Bag Roundup this year. We planned and advertised more than any other class I have had which made a big difference. Some students even made posters to post in the community at places like their post office box and Sobeys. I know for certain at least one person brought a giant bag of bags to our school because he saw the poster at Sobeys. He didn't even have any children in this school! Everyone was very tolerant of the constant mess of plastic bags floating around in our room and did a good job of working around them. We had one final delivery of bags today and some friendly grade 3 and 4 students helped count them at lunch while my students were at volleyball practice.
Our final count was 9410 which is JUST below our goal of 10 000. Last year at Bird's Hill School we collected 4800 so we nearly DOUBLED last year's collection. THIS IS AWESOME! That is a lot of bags we are keeping out of the landfill.
While the Plastic Bag Roundup is done for this year, that doesn't mean you should throw out your bags. Most grocery stores have a big plastic container at the front door where plastic bags are collected for recycling. Or, if you have a LARGE closet, you could save them for Plastic Bag Roundup 2012!
Oh, and our frisbees were delivered today! Each student in my class who participated in the project will get a frisbee and the rest will go to classrooms and the Phys Ed program.
Thanks for all the support!

-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Bird's Hill School Me to We Club

Today a group of kids from our Me to We Club were invited to attend the Media Literacy Week kickoff event at the Manitoba Museum. The theme of Media Literacy Week this year is Digital Citizenship and how we can use digital media with children in a positive way, how we can use digital media to make the world a better place and to create change.
You can see more about our Me to We Club and our video presentation from today at our BHSFreetheChildren blog.
Here we are being interviewed by CBC!



-Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

TWAS

This week at school we did a big project my partner was mason he was a good partner. He helped me with a project. The project was a wind vane and it was fun. We had a fun time together and I hope we do another project. But I think we had a lot.


I gym I had a lot of fun because we had a gusset teacher his name is Mr. Wood. He is a nice teacher but he is a little mean but not a lot. He was super nice to me and he is a sub for a gym teacher. I hope he will come back and sub for us. We played volleyball and my partner was Emily. Emily said I was really good at volley ball I was super at playing agents the other component.

In music I did a really fun time doing the computer job. Instead of doing singing part of music. In music we sang all about Remembrance Day. Our songs were about assemble for our gussets.

Plastic Bags

At school we finished the plastic bag round up. Are total was 8910 plastic bags. We worked really hard on this BIG project. We had 30 garbage bags full of little plastic bags. Every day people kept bringing in bags to our room. Our goal was 10 000 bags. We were so close! We needed 1090 more bags to reach our goal. It was very fun to work on this year.

Madison and Jada