More Joy!

One of our goals as a class this school year is to find joy everyday! It can be tough, especially when we are on week 3 of indoor recess... BUT we sure did have some fun this afternoon!

We got together with Mr. B's class and we held a 'Holiday Minute to Win It'! We were put into 4 teams and we had different challenges we had to do. We all had a blast!

Here are some photos of our afternoon!

Reindeer Games - we put vaseline on our noses and had to transfer red pompoms from one plate to another, using only our noses and NO HANDS!

The Cookie Crumble - Mrs. Waters placed a cookie on our foreheads, and we had to move it down our face, into our mouths, without using our hands! We could only use our face muscles.

Almost there!

The Snowman Stack - we had to see how many marshmallow snowmen we could make in one minute, by stacking 3 marshmallows on top of each other.

Extreme concentration!

Snowball Shake - we had a kleenex box full of ten 'snowballs' tied around our waist, and we had to shake all of them out of the box in one minute!

We had some great moves!

Holiday Wreath - we had to toss marshmallows through the wreath, into the Frosty the Snowman container behind. That was tricky!

Holiday Fun!

We played a really fun holiday game this week!  

Here are the instructions in case you want to try it out with your family over the holidays!

THE CHRISTMAS GAME:

All you need are sturdy paper plates and pens for each player.

The leader tells the players to put their paper plate on their head.

Then the leader will give a series of instructions for the players to draw on their paper plates (that are on their heads) without looking.

Here are the instructions:

1. Draw a line for a floor.

2. Draw a Christmas Tree. Add decorations if you feel so inclined.

3. Draw a star on top of your tree.

4. Draw a fireplace with a mantel next to the tree.

5. Draw a stocking hanging from the mantel of your fireplace.

6. Draw a present below the tree.

After the six steps have been given, everyone gets to look at their masterpieces!

The players have to count up how many points they received by following this rubric:

1. 2 points if the tree touches the floor.

2. 2 points if your stocking is touching your mantel.

3. 1 point if your star touches your tree.

4. 1 point if your star is above your tree.

5. 1 point for every Christmas ornament ball that is ON your tree, etc.

6. 1 point if your fireplace doesn’t touch the tree (it’s a fire hazard!). 

7. 1 point if you actually drew something decorative on your stocking.

8. 2 points if your present is under your tree.

Our pictures were awful, but we had a blast playing the game! Try it out!

The drawing process!

And the reveal!

Look at our hilarious drawings!

Winter Painting

Today was Friday the 13th, but we were pretty lucky! We had PJ day because yesterday was our Holiday Concert. We were exhausted! We decided we earned a day to be LAZY! We turned on the fireplace and spent the morning reading, relaxing, and watching a movie. After lunch we went for a quick library class to stock up on new books for the break, and then we did a fun art project.  We were making birch trees scenes at either night or dusk. 

To begin, we had to decide if we wanted our scene to be oriented either landscape or portrait. Next we took green painters tape and created our trees with branches.

We had to make sure that there were no air bubbles in the tape, or else it would ruin our nice white trees.  Our next step was to take watercolour paints and cover the whole paper in colour. We had to make sure all of the white parts of the paper were covered.

Once we were done painting and our paper was wet, we sprinkled some salt on our paper. When our papers dry with the salt, it will look like snow (hopefully)!

Stay tuned for part two on Monday!

Here are some photographs of us being lazy. Enjoy!

Have a great weekend!

Indigenous Science!

We have spent some time talking in Social Studies class about Indigenous contributions to science. Indigenous people have been scientists for thousands of years, and the science community is finally starting to realize just how useful their traditional knowledge is to our world today.  Indigenous have a very sophisticated understanding of the world around us, as they traditionally depended on the land and its plants and animals to survive.

We learned some really interesting things! We studied the engineering ideas behind building homes such as tipis, igloos, and pit houses, and how to build the right kind of canoe for certain bodies of water.  We learned that they used astronomy in order to find their way around. They use their knowledge of animals and ecology to understand sustainability. 

Did you know:

-when a habitat is becoming polluted, frogs are the first animals to go? 

-when the grasshoppers are active and singing, the air conditions are ideal to dry meat like fish?

-a birch bark canoe can carry 40 times its own weight?

-a well-built igloo can hold the weight of a fully grown adult?

-there are many plants in nature that Indigenous people use for medicine? For example, red willow acts as a medicine similar to Aspirin, and cedar can be boiled as a tea to treat colds and flus

We are happy to see that natural resource businesses such as forestry and fishing are starting to use the knowledge that Indigenous people have in order to better protect our environment.

Here's some photos from our design projects:

We tried building canoes out of tin foil! We were able to get most of them to stay upright in the water, and to also hold some weight (marbles)!

Building an igloo is an art. It spirals gradually from the bottom to the top.

Trying to figure out how to build a pit house.

Tipi building is tough! One pole can take the whole tipi down!

More igloo construction

Working together to figure it out!