Teacher Appreciation Day.

Today was teacher appreciation day at Chantrell Creek and did I ever feel appreciated.  Jessica walked in this morning and handed me this book and said, "here Mrs. Betts, I made this for you!"  I was so touched.  I think you will see why when you read the book.

Thank you to all my students.  You make my day so much fun.  I am lucky to be a part of your learning journey! 

Science in the Classroom

Today we had a scientist visit our classroom! His name was Diatomic Dillon.  He was from High Touch High Tech.  We learned so much and had so much fun.  In Science we have been learning all about matter and today we learned even more!  The first experiment we did was to take skewers and poke them into a bag of water.  We got 24 skewers in before our bag started to leak! 

Do you know why the water didn't leak out?

Next we used pipettes, water and a penny.  We had to see how many drops of water we could put on the penny.  Before we did the experiment we made a hypothesis (which is what we think might happen).  Most of us thought that we could get between 1 and 6 drops of water on the penny.  When we actually did it some of us actually got between 20 and 30 drops!  We noticed that the water drops joined together.  This was similar to what happened in the experiment with the skewers.

Maxim was very careful and very engaged in his task!

Diatomic Dillon shared with us the word for when molecules stick together.  Its called cohesion.

Next we experimented with mixing different states of matter together. We mixed a solid with a liquid and got a different type of substance.  We used some of the words we had learned in our matter unit to describe what we were observing. 

Fizzy

 Bubbly

Popping

Foamin








We also learned about density.  Watch this video and see if you can explain why Mr. Squiggly sinks when Diatomic Dillon squeezes the bottle and why he floats when he lets go.  Once you have tried to explain why watch the second video for his explanation.  Leif was able to give us a very good explanation but Mrs. Betts missed video taping it.  He was so quick with his thinking!!!!

It was another fabulous day of thinking, asking questions and learning something new!  We are super scientists.  We use all our senses to make observations and we are always asking questions.  Thank you to High Touch, High Tech for an informative and engaging science session!

Our Message to You!

This Wednesday is anti-bullying day across the province~ Every day at Chantrell Creek is anti-bullying day!  We made some messages to share with you!

In our class we try and live by the old saying ~ "If you don't have anything nice to say, don't say anything at all."

Science and Buddies ~ So much fun!

We have been celebrating Science week at Chantrell Creek.  This week we found out that our buddy class has been learning about matter just like us!  We were so excited because they invited us into their class to watch some very cool science experiments that had to do with matter.  We were in small groups and each group got to see something different.  Our buddies each had a job to do in the group.  One of the jobs was to film the experiment.  Then we watched it on Apple TV.  It was so much fun and a great way to learn more about matter!

 Lots of questions!

 

Exploding Volcanoes in a baggie!

Inflating balloons!

Thank you Buddies for an afternoon of fun and learning! 

Love those rainy days!

We LOVE rainy days.  We get to stay inside and play!

Playing with pattern blocks

Lego is always a popular choice

Some of us just love to draw in our Kid Picks books,

Building with blocks ~ future engineers or architects or contractors or ?

What do you like to do on rainy days?

Good writing in our class

We have been working hard on our writing skills over the past months.  As part of our ongoing assesment we asked ourselves the question, " What does good writing look like?"  We shared our thinking in pairs and then met to print them on the smart board.  Below is what we think good writing looks like in our class.  We plan to use this criteria to look at our Journal writing and see how we are doing.  We are going to try and use the app Explain Everything to share our thinking!  We'll let you know how we do!

Incredible math thinking!

All year long during our calendar activities we have talked about odd and even numbers.  We have discovered that all even numbers end in 0, 2, 4, 6, and 8 and odd numbers end in 1, 3, 5, 7, 9.  Today in calendar we looked at how many days we have been in school.  According to our calendar it is  114.  We knew that 114 was an even number and that even numbers can be divided equally so Mrs. Betts then posed a question to us - if it is even and we can divide it equally between 2 people how much would each person get?  There was lots of mumbling and talking going on.  One student put up their hand and said 59 and then someone else said, no, no its 57.  I asked them to explain their thinking and here is what they said . . . .

 I took 100 - I know that half of that is 50, then I took 14 and I know that half of that is 7 because  7+7 is 14 so then I add 50+7 and get 57


And to think these kids are Grade 2  (7 and 8 years old!)  I am impressed with their thinking and the way they could explain that thinking to our class!

Could you do that at 7 or 8 years old?  How do you solve number problems?

A Special Gift

In December, we read a book called, "The Mitten Tree."  It was about an old lady who made mittens for the children in her neighborhood.  She hung them on a tree and the children picked then off.  When they found out who had made all the mittens they took her more wool.  It was a lovely story about giving and caring. 

While we were reading it, Matt and Nik's Oma stood quietly listening to the story and our discussion. Without saying a word to us she left our classroom and spent the next 2 months knitting a pair of socks for every student in our class!!!!!  I'm sure you could imagine our excitement when she arrived the other day to give us her "gifts from the heart."  The squeals of delight could be heard throughout the hallways!  We quickly removed our shoes and socks and put on our new ones.  One student said, "these are the best socks to wear when you want to stay in your pjs all day!"  I couldn't agree more!  From all of us, we thank you for our special gifts. We'll never forget your kindness.

Buddy Time!

Today we met with our buddies.  This is one of our favourite times of the week.  We shared our Matter books that we are creating on our iPads with them and they shared their booklet on Ancient Egypt with us.  We learned lots of things about Egypt.  Check out our individual blogs to see what we learned!

 Thanks for sharing with us Big Buddies!  Can't wait till next time!

Measure This, Measure That

We have started a new unit on measurement.  First, we worked with a partner and used our hands to measure many different things in the classroom.  We realized that our answers to what we measured were different!  After much discussion we discovered that our hands were different sizes and that's why we got different answers.  We decided that we would measure with the same "tool" or "unit" the next day.  We thought if we did that then we should all get the same answers.  We used chalk brushes.  Here are some pictures of us measuring things and discussing our results

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We met again to talk about our results and we were stumped!  We still got lots of different answers for the same thing!  Hmmm. . . . . 



We began to ask how people were measuring their items.  We had many volunteers come up and show  us how they were using their chalk brush.  We discovered some people were using the it horizontally to measure and others were using it vertically.  We also found out some people weren't starting right at the edge of the object and some were leaving spaces between the brushes!  Finally, we came up with a set of guidelines to use while we are measuring.  Here is our chart reminding us how to accurately measure things. 

Here is a short video of us measuring the whiteboard using a chalk brush and following the guidelines from our chart.

Finally, we heard one student say, "This would be so much easier if we used rulers!"  I think that might work!  We plan to try that next time and see if everybody gets the same results when they measure the same thing.


Do you measurement in your job?  What types of things do you measure?  What tools do you use?

Chantrell Creek Celebrates Chinese New Year!

Today was Chinese New Year at Chantrell Creek.  Our school was decorated for the big day, thanks to many of our wonderful students and parents.

                                                                                                                                                                       Since it is the Year of the Snake we decided to make snakes.  We hung them up in our classroom!.

After recess we had an assembly.  We heard all about the traditions of
Chinese New Year.  We even saw a dragon dance and then the dragon
visited our classroom during our reading time!!

 

Thank you to Jenson for your wonderful pictures wishing us all a Happy Chinese New Year!