Fun at the Pumpkin Patch!

What a beautiful day for the pumpkin patch!   Thank you to all of the parents who were able to drive and supervise us on our first field trip of the year! Here are some of the highlights of our trip.

 How many different types of pumpkins were there?

Did we predict we would see one of these?

 There were lots of pumpkins at the end of the corn maze.  This one was very red and very large!

We didn't only see pumpkins.  What is he holding up? 

There were "turquoise" coloured pumpkins,

 orange ones with long "peduncles",

some without peduncles,

 ....and some that were just the right size!

We saw more than pumpkins.

As we were getting reading for the hayride back some of us noticed this creature behind us.  Can you tell what it is?

 This was a popular piece of equipment to go see and climb up into.

Do you know what kind of animal this is?

They were different colours but very friendly.

Here is the bird we wonder about.  Is this a bird, a duck or a goose?  We have added this creature to our wonder wall.  One guess we had this afternoon was that this may be a sandhill crane but the Google images pictures of cranes showed very pointy beaks and red on the tops of the heads.  We decided that this bird is NOT a sandhill crane.  We will continue to look for information to see if we can figure out this wonder of ours.

We even saw chicks with the mother chicken!

What a great day!  Do you have a favourite variety of pumpkin?  Have you ever tried to make pumpkin pie?  

Painted Pumpkins!

We have a pumpkin in our classroom!  On Friday we talked about its shape and physical characteristics and then we drew it on a large piece of paper with black crayon.  We then began painting.  We painted one section at a time using YELLOW PAINT.  Then we dipped our brushes into red paint and added it to the yellow and...presto change-o, it turned orange: very exciting!  This is our new display in the hallway.

This week we have been learning about the life cycle of the pumpkin.  We have read books and have discovered that not all pumpkins begin green and turn orange but can be white and other variations.  We will have our life cycle sequencing work on display soon in our classroom.

Next week we hope to go to one of our local pumpkin patches to learn more about pumpkins and see some other "living things".  Stay tuned for more about the differences between living and non-living things and more art that has to do with mixing colours.  We are also creating paintings during Centres time and hope to have many on display soon.

Calling all Builders!

On Friday our school participated in the Imagination Foundation's Global Cardboard Challenge.  This initiative was born out of the huge social media response to the video "Caine's Arcade".  The video can be watched from this link:

http://cardboardchallenge.com


To prepare for Friday afternoon, Mrs. Soo introduced the challenge in the Learning Commons and the Dolphins watched "Caine's Arcade".  Then we generated a web of creative projects we would consider trying to build out of cardboard.  This is what the Dolphins came up with:

Can you guess your child's idea?



We also read a fun story, Meggie Moon, by Elizabeth Beguley, about a girl and two boys who create things during their play in a junk yard!




With a room of cardboard, scissors and tape the Dolphins set off to work!  Here are a few photos I was able to capture in between helping with cutting cardboard:

Great job Dolphins, and thank you to Mrs. Soo for helping to get us ready.

Have you ever built anything out of recycled materials?

Our Terry Fox Run

Are you running,

Are you running,

For Terry Fox,

For Terry Fox?

We can find the answer.

We can beat the cancer.

For Terry Fox,

For Terry Fox.

On Friday the Kindergarten and Grade one students spent part of their day running to continue the fundraising campaign for cancer research and to get some exercise.  Many parents came to cheer us on and run with us.  We earned stamps for every lap around our grass field and some of our students ran eleven and twelve laps!  We have learned about Terry Fox's life and his accomplishments.  It was a beautiful day as you can see.

I Can Make a Pattern

We have been busy learning about patterns.  We know that patterns:

- must have at least two different elements (colours, shapes etc.)

- must have one group of elements that stays in the same order and repeats at least once.

We have been extending, creating and learning about how to label patterns.  Here are some of our products from one of our math activities last week when we visited two different stations: one using rubber stamps and one using bingo dabbers. 

We will also be looking for patterns in the environment.  What patterns can you find - in nature and human built?

Respect

Over the past few weeks we have been talking about respect at school.  We need to respect different parts of the school, other people and ourselves.  We have thought about what this would look like and sound like in each case.  We looked at this photograph of our playground:

The students generated a list of ways we would show respect: