Dance-a-thon Excitement!

Today was our dance-a-thon!  All month, students have been raising money for The Heart and Stroke foundation, and today was our school's dance-a-thon to show our support.  We ate an early lunch, then at 11:30, we all headed down to the gym.  

Brianne was the woman who set up our whole fundraiser, and after a quick introduction with her, we all got to meet a local celebrity, Chrissy Troy from 103 radio joined us to talk about how we can live a healthy lifestyle, and spent time warming up with us!

Altogether we learned 2 dances, one jazz and one hip hop, and we also got to experience Zumba!  The Zumba may have been the most fun!

The teachers promised the students that if they could raise over $1000, they would do a teacher dance.  Not only did we meet our school goal, we crushed it!  Our school raised almost $4000!  What a great feeling to be able to give such a significant donation to a worth cause!

Check out our many pictures of the event and take a couple of minutes and watch the videos.  One is of our jazz dance, and the other of Zumba!

Welcome Chrissy Troy!

Under the Sea!

Today Room 20 as well as Rooms 24, 23, and 14 went to Westwood Collegiate to watch the Divisional Musical Theatre production of The Little Mermaid!  

We all had a great time and Mrs. Deyoe was proud of how well we represented Heritage School.

It was neat seeing the very thoughtful sets and costumes and we enjoyed seeing some of our fellow students from Heritage perform!  It was a great production!

Going Fishing and Barbara Reid Art

As usual today was a busy day here in Room 20.  We began learning about a new Science unit, "Forces that Attract and Repel".  We started off by making a list of all the things that we already know about magnets.  

We then had a chance to go fishing!  Each student had a fishing line to use to "fish" for sea creatures.  On the end of the fishing line was a paper clip, and each sea creature was attached to a magnet.  Students had a lot of fun!

As our latest Art project, we've been learning about the author/illustrator Barbara Reid.  We began by reading several of her books and talking about how they are similar.  We learned that all of her illustrations are made from plasticine.  We then read a little bit more about her.  To make each of her pictures, she begins by drawing out a plan, then sketching what she wants to make on cardboard (she uses pizza boxes no less!) then when she is finished, her photographer husband takes a picture of the completed piece.  These photographs are what make up the illustrations in her books.  

"Subway Mouse" by Barbara Reid

We are going through the same process as Barbara Reid to create our projects, without the pizza boxes that is!  Students first came up with an idea for their picture and sketched it out, including a note about what colours of plasticine they would need.  They then drew the outline of their picture on the foam board that they are using as the backing.  After our conversation about how the plasticine is spread on, students got to work.

We aren't finished, but hopefully after another Art session tomorrow, we will be ready to photograph are masterpieces!  They really are turning out wonderfully!

Constructing Skeletons!

And no...not the type of skeletons with heads, but skeletons of the 3D solids we have been learning about in class.

Today, each student was given a chance to build two 3D solids using straws and marshmallows.  We reviewed our 3D objects and discussed why we could choose some and not others.  Since the straws were edges and the marshmallows vertices, we could not construct a solid that did not have either of these, which meant a cone, sphere, and cylinder were not possible.  That left students with four choices of solids to choose from, a cube, rectangular prism, triangular prism, and pyramid.  Most students chose a cube for their first attempt, but we had much more variety with the second.

3D Object Nets and the iPads!

Today was a busy day in Room 20.  We spent some time this morning reviewing our 3D objects and building nets (which are a picture of the object unfolded).  Each student had to make three different objects from the nets, a cube, a rectangular prism, and a triangular prism.  This activity was to help reinforce the edges, faces, and vertices of the different objects.

This afternoon we had a chance to do something for the first time...try out our new iPads!!!  We finally got our pod of classroom iPads last week, and they are now all set up and ready to use.  In groups of 2 or 3, we explored some of the apps that are on them.  Mrs. Deyoe has put some fun apps on to help us with our word work and math practice, but the iPads came with some fun applications as well.  A couple of us played around with the Book Creator app and realized that we could write our own stories and insert pictures to the pages!  This will be a lot of fun to use with our writing.