Me In a Bag

One of the ways that we've been getting to know our peers is by our presentations called "Me In A Bag".  I actually learned about this one from one of my education classes in college.  We each had to bring a bag with three objects that help describe ourselves.  We were in an English literature class, so all of our items had to be a book, but it was up to us as to which books we could bring.  I took this project a little too seriously and had my mom mail me down some of my favourite childhood books, including one book that I had personally made.  There is something about sharing your belongings and claiming identity towards them.

For our class, we can bring in three different items.  I handed out a brief outline that the students could fill in as a brainstorming activity.  I've attached them with this post so you can take a look!

Here is a student's reflection on the "Me in a Bag" presentations (I've taken out names....)

We have doing projects on "Me in A Bag."  So far we've had girl 1 bring a rock from Rudy Creek.  We've had boy 1 bring a photo of his hockey team.  Girl 2 brought a picture of her dogs.  Boy 2 brought a hockey card of Alexander Ovechkin.

I'm looking forward to the other things the students will bring in.  I've given permission for some students to bring in pets, so we'll see how that goes!

Boggle their Minds

While trying to create some fun, interactive bulletin boards,  I came across this idea of putting a boggle board up.  All I needed to do was make a 5 by 5 grid, and add letters to each square.  One particular thing I love about it is that it will be so easy to change up.  Just change the letters in the squares!  In a basket below I keep boggle papers, where students can record words that they find in the chart.  Whenever they have finished an activity and are waiting for their classmates, they pull out their boggle sheet to see what they can find.  It's been a hit!  Some students are even working on it while they eat their lunch!  I hope the excitement will continue!

Student's Reflection

From the word's of student:

Today in class we did all sorts of things, We did Math, PE, Language Arts, and all sorts of things.  In math we did Revews. In P.E. We played gold rush.  At the end of the day we looked at our science experiment after we left it a night to sit.  it looked realy cool the oil was floatig on the water witch was blue from food couloring. 

The First Day Dive

Wow, what a wonderful day!  It all started with a beautiful half hour drive to school.  The fog laid over the fields with sun breaking it up into patches.  The mountains screamed God's glory and I couldn't help but think "this is the day that the Lord has made.  Let us rejoice and be glad in it."  And what a day to rejoice.
Our class is filled with 26 wonderful students!  There are a booming 19 students in grade five, and 7 in grade four, all of which are unique and willing to contribute to our atmosphere of learning!
We played a number of get to know you games, and completed a writing activity that gave me some idea about students' interests.  A lovely all-school chapel started out our afternoon in time of welcome and worship.  I got to play piano (!), something I'm happy to do in my spare time, let alone at my job!  The school gym echoes like nothing else, so when there are 100 students belting out "Great is Thy Faithfulness" its no wonder you have shivers down your spine.

The Dive of the Day today was by far our science experiment.  In the classroom, we have 2 lava lamps.  The students were enthralled by the blurbing (no, blurbing is not a word, but I thought it was realistic in describing what they looked like) bubbles throughout the day.  So when I told them the science experiment was going to be us making a lava lamp their attention was 100% focused.  I had numerous kids ask for the "procedure" so I thought I would post it here so parents could read it and choose whether or not they would be up for the "challenge."  It was a hit, with both girls and guys and grades!

Make Your Own Lava Lamp

Materials:
An empty bottle
Water
Vegetable Oil
Food Colouring
Alka Seltzer


1.  Fill 1/4 of the empty bottle with water.

2.  Fill the rest of the bottle with oil (before doing this, the students predicted what they thought would happen)

3.  Record what took place (stayed separate, talk about density)

4.  Add the food colouring (before doing this, predict what will happen)

5.  Break the Alka Seltzer into 4, and place the pieces in one after another.

The Alka Seltzer foams in the water and makes the water rise in bubbles to the top of the bottle.

Apparently, if the bottle is capped, you can let it sit for a couple of days and then add more alka seltzer later and it will still work.

Super cool experiment!  The kids loved it (can I say this enough?) and we tried numerous things afterwards.  (What would happen when we shook it, what happens if we put other liquids into it, what happens if we would freeze it...etc.)

We'll see if I can get some pictures and add them to this post soon!

Here's to a fabulous year of learning and exploring to come!