Welcome to our community! We created this tour of our local community. We hope you enjoy it! After exploring what we have in our community, we each chose one feature to share. We wrote our scripts and recorded in front of a green screen. Then we added a picture in the background and voila!

Special Family Recipes

To celebrate what is special about each of us and our families, we brought in a recipe that has created good memories in our family. Each of us thought about why this recipe is special and shared when we usually enjoy it. We put our collection together in a book, check it out! {This view has slightly changed the book. To see what it actually looks like, click the link below to "view the book larger"}

 

Click here to view this photo book larger

The new way to make a photo album: photo books by Shutterfly.

New Read Aloud || Flora and Ulysses by Kate DiCamillo

We have a reading goal. We want to read, as a whole group (read alouds) 30 books before spring break! After Christmas we decided to set a goal and track it using www.goodreads.com. When we finish a book we rate it and write a review. You can see our reviews over there --> along the side of our blog. We finished a chapter book last week so this week we spent some time reading picture books we were interested in. Now it is time to start another chapter book. In the past, grade 2's have enjoyed hearing other books by Kate DiCamillo so we are going to give this one a try. Before we started we watched this book trailer:

Stay tuned to hear what we think of it!

The Kids of Room 4 :)

Special Guest Artist!!

This morning we were really lucky to have a special guest visit us! We are researching careers and Karsten chose to research an artist. Elaine Dilay is a painter and came to answer his questions!

Elaine told us a technique to start with the lighter colours always. She is also a fast painter. She is a really good painter. - Ryann

Next she used a different colour of paint and she kind of taught us to put the paint on kind of thick so the white canvas doesn't show through. She is a really, really, really good painter. - Shelby

She taught us to not put too much water or it won't look like anything. - Marley

At the end she stuck the saran wrap on the light part and dragged it down to blend it together. - Ashley

She sprayed the water so it would look cool and drip down. She said don't use a lot of water or else the paint will all run away. - Andrew

She taught us to paint carefully so we wouldn't get it all smudged. - Dyson

We learned not to use too much dark colours or else is will look muddy. - Adam

She sells her paintings online, at her house, in some stores and some galleries in Winnipeg. She told us where she gets all the supplies and canvases. Sometimes from Michael's, sometimes from the dollar store and sometimes from a special art store. - Shelby

She has been painting since she was a kid and has been painting like this since she was about 25. She wasn't feeling well but didn't want to waste the day so she got some supplies and started painting. She like being an artist because there are no rules about art.

I asked what inspires her art and she said lots of things like stores, clothing, buildings, houses.

 

The Best Part of Us!

We wrote a book! Check it out here!!

Our Book!

Click here to view this photo book larger

Shutterfly allows you to customize your photo book just the way you want.

Walter Wick :: I Spy

In IBL I have started a new project with a grade 3 class exploring the work of Walter Wick. He is the photographer behind I Spy books and Can You See What I See? Today we explored the books with an examining eye and noted what we notice about his work and what we wonder about his work. We collected our wonders on this padlet. We are going to connect with Walter Wick, either online or with a Skype call next week to actually ask him our questions! Then we will use his expertise to publish our own "I Spy" book with our own collections of items. We are all pumped about this project!

Created with Padlet

Supporting Our Community

As we continue to explore our community, we are talking about how we can support our community and help the people around us that are in need. There are two great initiatives going on right now that we can help with!

 First, we found out through Instagram that Siloam Mission, (a shelter in Winnipeg that provides food, shelter, clothing and many services to the less fortunate) is in immediate need of men's and women's jeans and hoodies. If you have any of these items that you no longer need and would be willing to donate, please send them to school and I will deliver all donations to Siloam Misson. 

Second, Kid President initiated SOCKTOBER! You can check out the video below that explains it very well and has a little dancing too! Our SPIN Club is collecting *new* socks for the first two weeks of October. They will be donated to a shelter in our regional community to help those in need.

So this is where we are starting with ways we can support our communities. We are just beginning!

 

Our Great Community Walk!

Today we went on a walk to explore our community and look closely at the things we have in our community.

When we started the walk we saw lots of things like the mailboxes and we saw the bank and a lot of stuff. -Shelby

WE had partners and mine was Ryann. We carried the clipboards and the pencil and wrote lots of stuff on the paper. -Matea

On the walk we saw lots of big trucks and we walked to Sobey's and there were lots of acorns on the ground. -Andrew

On the walk we passed my dad's work when we were heading to the park. He works at a chiropractor.  -Dyson

We saw my friends work. It's by Jonesy's. It's a dentist. On the way before I saw my friends work, we saw some acorns. -Ashley

I saw lots of Ford trucks. -Karsten

Then we started heading to the park and we played there for about 20 minutes or so. -Ryann

So we found two hundred or two thousand acorns so that was fun doing our walk because we got to play at the end at Quarry Park. -Alex

We went to the park and I went on the swing and then after that we looked at lots of acorns. I picked up lots too. -Karsten

When we were heading to the park I saw a lot of cool stuff and I saw a car getting fixed. -Shelby

It Only Takes One || Be Someone's Hero

Welcome back! We have had a great start to grade 2 this year already!

A common theme we like to focus on at our school is the idea the it only takes one person to make a difference. By doing one simple, kind thing for someone else we can change their day and send a ripple of kindness around. We talk about this a lot at school and especially in our assemblies when we are all together.

Yesterday at our Welcome Back assembly, Mrs. Palamar showed us a great video from the oh-so-entertaining Kid President. He always has the best messages and delivers them so well! There were so many great quotes to take away from this video, we will definitely be watching it again in the future. Here is the video for you to check out and some of our favorite and most important quotes!

"You have everything right now to change the world."

"Heroes are just ordinary people doing extraordinary things. They inspire other people to be extraordinary."

"If you want to be awesome, treat people awesome."

"It’s about compassion; there is nothing stronger than that."

"You just need to care."

"You have everything that you need to make someone’s day more awesome."

"Someone may never have told you this, but I promise it’s true; the world needs heroes and that hero could be you."

Countdown Photobooth

For the last 11 days of school we have been having a countdown. Each day we pop a balloon and in the balloon is a special activity for us to do the next day. Some of them have been reading outside, sidewalk chalk outside with new, special chalk and bonus computer lab time. Last week one of them was a photo booth. I brought in a backdrop and some props for the kids to use. It turns out grade 2 kids are THE BEST in a photo booth. The endless energy and creativity works quite well! As you will see, some of them LOVED being in front of the camera. It was up to the kids how many photos they wanted but everyone got in at least one shot (not everyone's photo can be posted to the blog). There are a few that are in about 60% of them! This was a blast. Enjoy!

Touring Canada

We had a lot of success with our #postcardproject and learned about a lot of different communities in Canada. Now we are using that learning along with Tellagami to create a virtual tour of Canada! Each student will create a gami with 30 seconds worth of the information they got on their postcard. The full details of each location can also be seen on our Google Map of Canada.

Here are some of our gamis!

We Went to the Zoo, Zoo, Zoo...

Today we went on a field trip to the zoo! We had an excellent time and learned a ton. We also went to the Nature Playground which is amazing. If you live in Winnipeg or are ever in Winnipeg, you need to check it out. When we got back to school we made this slideshow with our pictures from the day. The kids added their ideas to some of them. Check it out!

zoo from LeslieDent on Vimeo.

30 x 30 Nature Challenge! {get outside}

We are participating in an exciting challenge this May! The 30 x 30 Nature Challenge. The David Suzuki Foundation  offers this challenge each spring, challenging Canadians and people around the world to join the 30×30 Challenge by spending 30 minutes a day in nature for 30 days. We have responsibilities at school that we still need to take care of so we are going to be creative in how we get outside. Sometimes we will be exploring, sometimes we will be reading and sometimes we will be writing. You can join us in the challenge by clicking here and signing up. Also, follow us on Instagram (@terrifictwos) to see how we are getting outside and use the hashtags #natureiscalling and #30x30challenge


The David Suzuki Foundation also posts some great daily tips (see the link on the website) with ideas of what to do outside to connect with nature. We will certainly be using a few of these!
We hope you will join us! If you plan to participate, leave us a comment so we can connect.

#postcardproject

This year in Social Studies we have been learning about our community and comparing our community with other cities. Now we are ready to learn about lots of other communities in Canada during our current unit - The Canadian Community. We are looking for LOTS of information and we hope you can help.

We would like Canadians from other parts of Canada to send us a postcard from their community. On the postcard we would like them to tell us information about their part of Canada. We have brainstormed a list of questions we are interested in asking other Canadians. If you are interested in sharing with us, leave us a comment below. We can communicate by email, snail mail, Google Hangout or Skype.
We posted about the project on Instagram and have some more folks that are going to connect with us too! You can find us @terrifictwos.
As the postcards start coming in we will post the locations and the facts we learn to our Google Map. Each pin on the map will show a location where we know someone and when you click on it, the information they sent us will pop up. We will also post them in our classroom on our wall map of Canada.
We will keep sharing here on the progress of the project so stay tuned!

The letter we sent to our fellow Canadians

The questions we generated to ask them! We each highlighted the ones that are important to us and asked our person those questions.

An Exciting Guest Reader!!

This week we were very lucky to have a special guest reader! Frankie Hollywood from Energy 106 came and read "Yuck, A Love Story" to us. It was so fun! He was a very energetic guest. He told us that he has been a morning radio personality for 25 years. He has to wake up at 2:45 AM!!! That is so early! He reads for 2 hours before he goes to work. He has to read the latest news, celebrity gossip, and sports news so that he knows what is up for his radio show. He told us reading is very important for his job. He also recorded us saying "Bird's Hill School loves to read" and then played it on the radio twice the next morning! We got to ask him questions too. His favorite sport is hockey and his favorite team is the Jets. He has met a lot of celebrities like Zach Bogosian and Taylor Swift!

We Are Live!

Our Kidblogs are live! We got to start our posts on our very own student blogs today! I bet the hoots and hollers could be heard in Portage la Prairie! 

The students have worked very hard to navigate through digital citizenship, internet safety and creating their paper blogs. You can read more about that over on this post. Today we learned how to find our blogs (here or the Kidblog link on the right side of this page), login, change our avatar, we voted on the background and we started typing our first posts! Some of the kids were so excited about it all they decided they would finish them from home tonight!

As we wrote our first posts on paper, we followed this criteria:

We will keep you updated as we continue to publish our posts and hope you will leave us a comment. Comments are what encourage the kids to keep posting!

~ Mrs. Dent Scarcello :)

Our Student Blog Journey. On your mark, get set, start with paper. What!?

We are on the Kidblog journey! Very soon we will each have our own live blogs. This was the plan all along but the plan was quickly put into motion when we had a few students head off on vacation after Christmas.
Typically when students go away I send a travel journal with a few activities for them to do while they are away that they get to keep after as a vacation keepsake. This time I decided to give them the option of a paper travel journal or doing it on their kidblog. I gave them a quick how-to and they were off. You can check out their awesome travel blog posts here. Also take a look at the conversations that were generated in the comments section. Very cool.

When I introduce student blogs there are some safety and ethics conversations that need to happen first. We start with a conversation about what exactly a blog is, what all the different parts are about and what it means to be a responsible digital citizen. Much of this vocabulary is new, like posts, gadgets, commenting, global audience and digital citizenship. The children need to make the connection between what they say to someone in person and what they say to or about someone online as being the same thing. They need to understand that just because they are posting to their blog on their own doesn't mean that what they post does not affect other people. And they need to understand that unlike when they write in their notebook which stays on the shelf, when they post to their blog it is for a global audience. All of this comes with great responsibility that they need to understand and take seriously.

Next we tackle blog design. I want them to take time to think about catchy, thoughtful titles, writing posts that have purpose and make sense and the fun things like gadgets and backgrounds. I have found that they take more time with this and can focus on it better if we do it on paper first. They create a paper blog, doing the fun design parts first, and then will write and edit their first blog post on paper. We discuss the elements and process expected for writing a quality blog post. Once that is complete we will discuss and create criteria for quality commenting and use sticky notes to leave comments on each others paper blogs.

It may sound like a drawn out process but I feel very strongly about the teaching that needs to take place around digital citizenship and using social media responsibly. In this day and age, we need to take online safety, responsibility and respect as seriously as we do in our classrooms and hallways.

I have adapted some of these ideas from @pernilleripp.

Introductions

Hello!
My name is Mrs. Chubey and I am Mrs. Dent Scarcello's teaching partner. We share a classroom and students. I teach every day in the morning, and Mrs. Dent Scarcello teaches in the afternoon.
So far we have really enjoyed working as a team at school. We have also found many things that we have in common, such as our adorable children at home. Here is my little guy, Liam!

Liam and his Elephant (21 months)

And another, with Liam's dad and me!

Mrs. Dent Scarcello has graciously invited me to post on her blog, so that I can share what our class is up to in the morning half of our day.
Stay tuned for more posts about Math, Science, and other adventures in learning!

-Mrs. Chubey

Brilliant Children

You know those moments when a young person just amazes you? We had that today.

Yesterday afternoon I was at a meeting for all the early years technology coordinators in our school division. One of the teachers shared a few links she thought were neat. There was one that I thought would be cool to try with our class and we happened to have computer today so I decided to go for it. I spent about 5 minutes or less showing the kids the basics. Click here, type your name, pick some of these and go! This is when the magic happened. They thought it was a neat website and jumped right in. Every single student in our class created a story with actions, characters and more than one page! Some added in extra details, some focused on the actions, all of it was awesome. As our time came to an end I was bombarded with proud requests like:
"How do I keep it?"
"Can you send this to my parents?"
"I want to  make another one!"
"I want to keep adding more sentences!"
Yes please! We will definitely keep exploring this one! This time we were trying it out, the students hadn't done any pre-planning about their story. Another time I will have them plan out a beginning, middle and end before creating. But sometimes it's fun to jump right in and play first.

I managed to grab a few samples to share. You can check them out by going to this link and using any of these codes:
LPP697 (Adam's story)
NWE077 (Kaz's story)
AUP417 (Alexis' story)
ADM774 (Anthony's story)
SDT043 (my story)

We're Back!

Happy 2015! I am back from my mat leave and enjoyed my time with my children very much. Aren't they adorable?

Once again I will be teaching grade 2 in the afternoons and Teacher Librarian doing Inquiry Based Learning with all the classes in the school in the mornings. I love this mix very much because I still get the close connection to the students in my class and can watch them grow and learn directly and then I also get to work with all the students on a wide variety of exciting projects. I will continue to blog here about both.
I will be introducing blogging to our grade 2 class this week and we will have things to share very soon! Stay tuned!