Five for Friday: November 13

Hi hi!

I'm popping in to link up with Kacey from Doodle Bugs Teaching and share 5 random things from this week!

We had our Remembrance Day assembly this past Wednesday.  Our Grade 8 teacher always organizes a fantastic assembly paying tribute to our veterans.

All classes made a wreath to present at the assembly.

Here is ours!

The kids used black and red tissue paper to decorate the poppies that I had cut out.  Then we hot glued it on to a styrofoam wreath that my ECE got from Michaels.  She also made the beautiful "REMEMBER" banner to go across our wreath.

We also read the book "A Poppy is to Remember" by Heather Patterson and talked about who veterans were and why we thank and remember them on Remembrance Day.  We talked about how many of the things we liked to do every day are things we would not be able to do if our veterans had not fought for our freedom.

Then we made this chart.

This chart also went in to the gym to be displayed during our Rememberance Day assembly.  After we get it back we plan to mail it to the Veterans' Care Facility at Sunnybrook Hospital in Toronto :)

It isn't always easy getting authentic student-led learning out of our students but this week was a great week!

Here is just one example.  We have been learning about measuring length in math.  One morning one of our students brought in this leaf at entry.  She mentioned to my ECE that the leaf was very long.  My ECE asked how she could find out how long it was when another student who was listening in on the conversation said "Why don't we make a leaf measuring centre and measure it with the linking chains?"

So my ECE set out the linking chains and a work space for them and the two of them got to work.  They decided that they were only going to measure the stem.  After they measured my ECE helped her record her sentence (The leaf stem is 6 linking chains long.) and we put the leaf, the linking chains, her sentence and our documentation of her learning process on our measurement wall.  We were so thrilled with the authentic learning that came out of this!  It was definitely a happy teacher moment :)

I have been looking for fun ways to strengthen the student's fine motor skills. I got this idea from @exploring_in_fdk_at_st.paul on Instagram.

The students use the tongs to balance the ping pong balls and marbles on the golf tees.  Some students even started making repeating patterns with them! 

#yay #twobirdsonestone

This is a little belated but we finally finished our co-created colour posters and put them up! In small groups we collected items of that colour and took pictures.  Then the students also helped write the labels.  They turned out really cute if I do say so myself :D

I blogged about some 2D shape interventions I tried this year earlier this week and also updated my 2D shapes unit to include all of the printables I mentioned in that post! If you already own it please redownload from TPT to get the new goodies! 

That's it from me! I hope you are having a great Friday!