Today was a busy and special day. All day long we celebrated the holiday with special activities. This morning the whole school took part in the Halloween Tabloid. All around the school there were different stations that we travelled to as a class. We visited the gym for a Halloween game with witches, wizards, and zombies. We went to the library to play ghostbusters. There was dancing in the music room, a snack and Spot It, Pictionary, a story, and and eyeball toss. It took us most of the morning to go to each station and we all had a lot of fun.
Playing the game in the gym!
Dancing in the music room.
Spot it and Snack time!
Playing Pictionary.
This afternoon the Halloween fun continued. We had our costume parade in the gym, then after recess we had our class party. We had many families contribute generously towards our snacks so there was plenty of food to go around. We finished up with a bit of choice time and some Halloween themed Just Dance.
It was a great day.
Thank you once again to all the families who provided snacks for our party! Rom 20 wishes you all a fun and safe Halloween!
Today was the students who are apart of the Winnipeg Jets Hockey Academy's first practice. That mean that about half our class were gone for two periods this afternoon. This is a weekly occurrence, and one that we get used to, but since today was the first time, we did a special art project. Using white crayons and watercolours, we painted a spider web with a multicolour background.
To begin we drew our web with white crayon. This was a little tricky as it was challenging to see on the white paper. We then used our brush to wet our paper. To paint our background we used a painting technique called wet on wet. This is where both the watercolour paint and the paper are wet. It makes the paint colours run together and creates a neat effect. Because we were using watercolour paper, it was a little tricky to get our paper wet enough as the paper was very absorbent. After a few tries though, everyone had the right idea. We had to leave them to dry and unfortunately could not add our last step, drawing the spider on with Sharpie. That will have to wait for another day.
Here are a few of the almost finished paintings. We still need to add in our spiders.
Next on our agenda was our Halloween stations. Students could move around the room and go to any station they wanted. Students could choose from two different math games, a l'halloween matching station, a problem solving station, and a Halloween fun book station.
Friday is of course Halloween, so this week Room 20 has been working on several Halloween themed activities.
Our latest writing project is a Halloween themed alphabet book. We've been working on our book for several days and many of us are ready to illustrate our published copy. We began by brainstorming lots of different Halloween words and organizing them alphabetically. Students then watched as Mrs. Deyoe wrote two entries. We then wrote a couple of letters together as shared writing. These will be part of our finished book. Next it was time for students to choose the letter they would like to work on. As students finished, some got the opportunity to work on another letter for the book.
We came up with some criteria for our alphabet book, based off of one of our sample books, "Z is for Zombies". We decided that we would not have "A is for..." which is common in alphabet books, but rather we would state what each letter stood for than write about it. We did not want our alphabet book to rhyme, and we decided upon an appropriate length for each letter.
Here are two of our shared writing entries for our book.
HHeadless Zombie
The headless zombie lurks in the night and he's looking for some brains to bite. Don't worry he'll probably be gone with the morning light.
C Cyclops
Cyclops is a hair, one-eyed monster. He sneaks out in the forest at night to feast. Is he real or is he not?
Another Halloween themed activity we did today was based upon patterning. Using Halloween figures, students reviewed repeating patterns, and predicting elements in a repeating pattern. Our goal is for each student to use strategies based upon number sense (skip counting, even/odd, etc.) to predict the element, and many of us are already using these strategies. We then practiced making growing and shrinking patterns as well.
This week we have also been learning all about l'halloween (or Halloween in French). We've been familiarizing ourselves with some of the vocabulary and working on some activities using the vocabulary. We've also found a fun l'halloween song called "C'est L'Halloween". We've listened to it at the beginning of each lesson.
Here we are listening to the song today.
Here is the song if you would like to listen.
Today's activity using the l'halloween words was to play tic-tac-toe with a partner. Each student received four game boards with pictures. Before they could place their X or O, students had to say the vocabulary word in French first. Partners got a chance to practice during 8 games.
