A Fond Farewell!

Thank you Cheetahs for an amazing year!  I loved being your teacher.  I wish all of you a happy, fun-filled summer and look forward to hearing all about your summer adventures in September.  Keep blogging!

Love, Mrs. Betts

PS  To all our friends in the blogging community . . . we are now on summer holidays.  We look forward to connecting with you again in September! 

Similarities and Differences

We have been blogging to the students in Ms. Betts grade 3 class in Yellowknife to learn about their community.  First we looked at our own community and it's unique features.  Then we sent our blog post to them.  They did the same and sent their blog post to us.  Finally we both compared the two communities.  We found that we had lots of things in common but there were also some differences.  We both decided it would be fun to visit each others community. Check out what we learned!

Sarina chose to do this Venn Diagram during free choice time!  Thanks for sharing, Sarina!

A Walking Field Trip

To finish off our community unit we did a walking field trip of our local community!  We were welcomed by many businesses!  We saw so many things. . . . here we are investigating and learning about our local community.

 We actually got to go into the bank vault!

Learning all about the bank!

Have you ever wondered how they store all the food that appears on the shelves at the grocery store?  Behind the scenes at Safeway!

Learning all about how clothes get dry cleaned!

Off to the next store!

The pharmacy . .  we learned all about storing medicines safely and how people get their medicine.

Off to another business. . . .

The deli . . .   there were some delicious foods in there!

 Just before we were to go the library for our tour we came across a fire truck. . . it was so exciting.  They stopped to talk to us.  They gave us lots of information about fire safety.

 Some of us even got to go inside the truck!

Snack time before our library tour. . .

The fabulous librarian at Ocean Park Library.  She is an amazing storyteller. . .  If you ever have a chance to visit when she is there you are in for a real treat!

Checking out a book!

 Reading is always a favourite activity of ours!






















Thank you to all the business in Ocean Park who took the time to talk to us and teach us about their jobs!  We had a great time!

A Day of Fun!

Wednesday June 4th was our annual Sports Day!  Each year we choose a theme and this year it was PIRATES!  We started the day with a bike parade.  Anyone who wanted to decorate their bike and bring it to school could.  The rest of the school watched and cheered them on as they traveled around the school.  Here are three of our bikers!

Once the parade was over we met in our colour groups and shouted out our cheers!  Everyone in the school is on a colour team ~ purple, gold, white and black . . .  We dressed in those colours to show team spirit.

Black Thunder!

Purple Storm

White Blizzard

Gold Lightning ~ they sure have lots of  spirit!

Once the bike parade was over we broke into our stations to try out all the fantastic activities that the teachers had planned for us. . . .

Digging for a key to find the treasure!

Found the key . . . now let's hope it opens the treasure chest!

X marks the spot!

Hurry, hurry, hurry!

Is that a cannon ball you had to carry?

Go Purple Go!

Another purple team member!

Everyone showed great sportsmanship and had a great time!  Thank you to all those who helped to make our sports day so much fun. 

Do you celebrate Sports Day at your school?  What kinds of things do you do?

Genuises at Work!

Many weeks ago we started our genius hour and we are almost finished!  Every Wednesday afternoon we meet with our buddies!   Before spring break we looked at questions and the difference between red light and green light questions.  Do you know the difference?

Red light questions are questions that make you stop and think, to ponder and to wonder.  Green light questions are questions that you can answer really quickly or that you can find the answer to easily.

After we did this we had to write as many questions about a basketball as we could think of. . . wow! did we ever have a lot of questions.  We then sorted our questions into red light and green light questions.  We also decided we needed a category that we could put questions in that weren't really relevant to our topic.  We called this the "Trash Can."













 Once we had a good understanding of questions and how they can help guide our learning we began to investigate our own wonders.  We started with a sheet to guide our thinking.

We had to choose a topic we were interested in and then begin to narrow our focus.  Once we had chosen our wonder topic and developed our guiding questions we began to research and find out the answers to our wonders.  Some of our topics included:  how to make glue, who would win. . .  a mandrill or a leopard, rock climbing, space, dolphins. . . And the list goes on and on!

We watched a short YouTube video made by a student explaining genius hour a bit more.  It reminded us that sometimes it can be hard work and that it doesn't always go like we planned.  We also got some ideas on how we might present our topic.  We are very excited to explore our wonders and can't wait to share them with everyone!  Here are some pictures of us working with our buddies!

Finding out how to rock climb safely and where you can do it!

Learning more about space. . . .

Researching how to make glue!

Lots of discussion between buddies!

 Learning all about Jupiter. . . they decided to make a model using plasticene and a poster to explain what they had learned.

Recreating the Battle of Gettysburg.  

Using the app Book Creator to make their own "Who Would Win Book"

Sometimes our little buddies teach our big buddies how to use the apps!