From the Author’s in Room 129!!
A Fall walk to inspire Fall poems
Stay tuned for our whirling, swirling, crisp fall poems. Happening this week!
Oh, I am ready!
The day is almost here. The First Day of School. The anticipation, the excitement, the new hair do’s 🙂 !!
Room 129 is ready and waiting for the adventure to begin!
Here is a little pep talk to get us started!
Can’t  wait to get started! Let’s be awesome together!
A Winnipeg Day – By Montrose School
A Winnipeg Day
Good morning, Prairie 360, you are one of the tallest buildings in Winnipeg. You are so tall I can see the whole city. I’m going to eat scrambled eggs and pancakes. Did you know you can live in the building below Prairie 360? Â (Jory)
Good morning butterfly keeper, can you tell me where the most butterflies hang out. My favourite are the black and blue ones. Â (Julia)
Good morning River walk, I need to get a snack at The Forks. I get mini donuts, they are hot! (Matteo)
Good morning dad, can you get me some breakfast please. “Thank you”, I say cheerfully “bye” and off I go to Montrose School. (Harrison)
Good morning Golden Boy, we are going to the Legislative Building. We did a tour and my favourite part was the Bison statue. Good bye Golden Boy. (Hudson)
Hello Winnipeg Public Librarian, can I take this book out please? Thank you. I take out a book called A Gerbil’s Life and I sit down in a red chair and enjoy my book. I learn 5 things:
- Gerbils do not need to bath. They take a bath in chinchilla dust.
- Female gerbils have up to 60 gerbils in a year.
- Gerbils need to have chew toys otherwise their teeth get twisted.
- Gerbils live up to 2-4 years.
- Gerbils like to have a friend in their cage. Â (Teija)
Hello Miss at the Pancake House, may I have a pancake please? Thank you very much! I like your pancakes. May I have another pancake for my sister? Â (Hanna)
 Good morning trees, I am walking in Assiniboine Park to go swinging. I will go to the metal slide 10 times. Good bye Assiniboine Park. (Gus)
Hello bike, we are going to play at Robert H. Smith park. After we stop at get a little treat at 7-11. I get on my bike and put my slurpee in my bike basket. (Meadow)
Good Afternoon book seller at McNally, could you show me where all the Piggie and Gerald books are? I get The Thank You book. My favourite place is upstairs. Bye book seller. Â (Kevin)
Good afternoon Investors Group Field, I hope I am on the fan cam. It’s the Bombers vs. The Rough Riders. The Bombers are winning 7 – 0. Now I am going to get cheese pizza and some popcorn. When I came back the score is now 35-36 for the Rough Riders. “BOOOOOOOOO!” Then the Bombers won 36-37. “WAAAAAAHOOOOOO!” Bye Investors Field. Â (Luca C)
Hola, I will go to U-Putz to play mini golf with my dad. The score is 10 for me and 7 for my dad. I win!! (Logan)
Good Afternoon zoo keeper, do you like dinosaurs because they ROAR so loudly! (Anton)
Hello Lazertopia, what should I do today? I play laser tag and I get hit 10 times. It was awesome! (Ryland)
I love to go to the zoo and see the Polar Bears. The baby Polar Bears are so cute. The cutest. I love them. Zoo Keeper, can you tell me the names of the animals at the zoo please? (Georgia)
Hi zoo, I want to look for the Polar Bears, but I don’t know where they are. Can you help me? Â (Levi)
Hi! I would like to go to the Pan Am pool. I like the deep end. I splash my cousins sometimes. We have splash fights. I like seeing my cousin go off the diving board. (Janna)
Hello Skyzone, let’s go to the tarmpolines. I jump so high I almost touch the roof! I always end with a Popsicle. (Mira)
Hello BDI, can I have a very good fudge sunday? Then I go across the BIG bridge and after the ice cream. I go to my last stop of the evening. Hello people on the River walkway, may I join you this evening. Thank you. Did you know that the River walkway was flooded in the first day of spring? Â (Kate)
Hello Great Big Adventures, can I get a stamp please? I am going on the green slide. (Arnav)
Hello Dairy Queen, I get a vanilla cone. Good Night Winnipeg, it was a great day! (Luca M)
Good evening golf course, let’s go, you go first. I won! I rock! Sorry everyone, next hole. Oh no, I lost, Whooooo! (Quintin)
Aloha MTS Centre, could you show me where Box 35 is please so I can watch the hockey game? I wonder who will win? The Jets Win! The jets were versing the Manitoba Moose. (Giuseppe)
Dandelions
Dandelions
Dandelions bloom like little suns.
But the flowers don’t last long –
they fold up like furled umbrella opens
into a puff of down:
a hundred fluffy parachutes, each carrying a small brown seed.
Just one blow and you set them flying.
~Nicola Davies
 We went outside today with no plan of course we had a plan! We finished reading Dandelions the poem by Nicola Davies and we were inspired to go and play with the dandelions. I asked the students to think about the poem, and asked them what it reminded them of. Gus said the life cycle of a dandelion, which I thought was pretty brilliant.
So outside we went, it is FUN playing in those dandelions… so FUN!
We created dandelion life cycles, we created art with dandelions, we ran through and played in fields of dandelions. The students worked all together, even though I told them they could break off into groups. It’s amazing how being outside really enhances team work and collaborations. They were yelling at each other, calling for each other to get things, excited to share what they were making and thrilled when others added to it!
Kevin found a sound stick! Only one sound stick though, so no stick band in the future I guess 🙂 .
Check out this life cycle of a dandelion:
Pretty accurate, right?!
Sometimes it’s really fun to just get inspired and go outside and discover. No plans often times = the best learning opportunities.
p.s. I really did have a plan all along 🙂
**Giuseppe was so inspired he found this huge dandelion and wanted to add it to our blog post! Thanks Giuseppe!!
Oh, We Glowed at the Musical
Yesterday we performed three times with The Pinocchio Show. We were wonderful (Teija). We sang really awesome, my favourite song was Pinocchio (Anton). When we sang Pinocchio our hearts were open (Kate). At the Piazza song was so great (Julia), it was so great because of the action from the actors (Teija). The show had many funny parts. Every single boy, girl, parent and grandparent laughed so hard (Luca C). We sang our souls out (Harrison). We did very good in every song (Hudson). We all glowed at the musical (Levi). There was so many people watching, I felt kind of scared (Kevin). When I am in Grade 5/6 I am excited to be the next musical star (Jory)! I am excited to be a singer because of the musical (Luca C). I am excited to always wear different costumes (Matteo).
We can’t wait until the next musical (Harrison and Ryland)!
Hope you enjoyed the show as much as we did! (Mrs. Thomas)
LOL,
Room 122 Students
A meeting of minds to challenge, grow and plan together
I met with our school Reading Clinician today! It was an exciting meeting as we met to discuss our Mentor Text Writing Project that we will be collaborating on in early May. We plan to LIVE TWEET!! Live tweet from Room 122! We will be tweeting out tweets, students will be tweeting and learning how to reflect in 140 characters or less! This is going to be awesome!
Backstory:
I recently joined twitter (laura_thomas_99 ~ follow me!) and I am just becoming comfortable with this form of social media and connecting with the World. I am no social media guru; but I do have a private instagram account, facebook account and I do snapchat. I love social media for the instant connection you can make with friends and family. As a parent myself, I love how easy it is to post daily tidbits, interesting, funny things that happen and it is really like an online, digital memory box of my life.
For the past few months I have been trying to think of ways to really open up the lines of communication to the parents and relatives of the students in Room 122. There is so much learning that is happening each and every day and it is at times difficult for these grade 1’s and 2’s to share by the time they get home. For the past 10 years I have done a weekly TWAS (This Week At School) with some success. Students write about fun things that happened, things they learned over the course of the week. I say some success, because very few students actually enjoyed writing TWAS and it was not an accurate representation of their week or their writing ability. So over the past year or so I have been doing a lot of reflecting with students, with parents and with myself. How can I show student learning? How can students show and share their learning?
When I ask students this they said: “facebook, a backpack with interesting facts inside, write facts in a bottle and send it in the River, write a book, do a presentation, youTube video, Poster, Bulletin Board, e-mail, video to share with parents, post online!” . As you can see, online technology came up quite a bit. These children have never known a life without technology. They learn it faster than we ever will, it is intuitive to them.
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So back to a meeting of minds! Monique and I met in early February to discuss working together on a writing project. At some point in the meeting, I thought; How cool would it be to LIVE TWEET this out to parents! Monique was encouraging and thought this was fantastic! So we started planning our project and planning how we would use twitter to communicate with parents. We set up twitter accounts and we started our explorations with twitter, so we would know how to tweet, re tweet and respond to comments.
We choose our Mentor text book – An Okoboji Day. This is a book from my personal collection, I bought it for my kids last summer. Okoboji is a place close to our hearts, it is where my brother and sister-in-law have a beautiful cabin on the water and we get to visit over the summer! The book has many literary components that we will be focusing on. And we plan to use it to model our way through students writing A Winnipeg Day.
Pre-teaching is happening right now! Students have brought in a place close to their hearts in Winnipeg. They have presented about their place. We mapped it on a map of Winnipeg. It is unbelievable to see all the cool places the students love! They love looking at that map, finding their houses and other places too. Next we are going to tally how many students have been to those places. What are Room 122’s favourite places?
Students will then take this information and begin to plan out places that they would visit in A Winnipeg day.
A Winnipeg Day.
Coming Soon…..
Beginning my journey into the blogging World
Hi Reader,
As I embark on this journey of blogging, I am both really excited and really nervous. I do follow a few blogs. I do have good friends who blog. I have been interested in blogging as a way to remember my own kids childhood in my sleep deprived state. This blog isn’t going to be about them though, this one will be about other children – my students! My wonderful, interesting, curious, glowing students! The most exciting part though… this blog will not just be about my students, my students will be blogging!! Grade 1 and 2 bloggers, how much cuter can it get! This blog will be about adventures we go on, things we learn, inquiries and discovering and questioning together.
This blog IS an adventure in it’s own way! We don’t exactly know where we are going with it, or where it will take us, but isn’t that the fun and interesting thing about adventures sometimes. I think so.
So here we go!