Gung Hay Fat Choy

Last week was so filled with activities, that I am a little late with my blog update and am just now trying to catch up. One of the highlights of last week was definitely our fun outing with our little buddies from Ms. Walker's class to Chinatown. We had the privilege to visit the Victoria Chinese Public School and participate in three workshops, which introduced this rich culture to our boys and girls. Our students took part in a writing class, they performed a lion dance and we watched an interesting movie, which taught us about the history of the school over the past 100 years. I was very proud of our students, who all behaved very well and were excellent ambassadors of Ruth King Elementary.
When we returned to school, we had a special luncheon and our boys and girls had a taste of Chow Mein, a traditional Chinese noodle dish.

Everyone had a great time and we would like to thank especially Jen, Amanda's mom; as well as Laura, Nic's mom, for accompanying us on this field trip. It is always wonderful to have parents come along and share these experiences with us!
After all this fun, we have gone BACK TO WORK at Ruth King and are starting a new unit on Aboriginal Peoples and INUIT in Social Studies as well as a unit on Decimals and their relationship to Fractions in Math. Please watch out for homeowork in Math, approximately 3 - 4 times per week! It's always great to have parents co-sign the agendas; this helps us to stay on the same page (literally!).
Keep up the great work at home! I can tell that TOGETHER we are making some good progress:)

 

Everything is a Story!

As part of our Literacy Week at Ruth King Elementary, we were lucky to attend two great presentations. The first one was by Troy Wilson, a local author of Perfect Man. Mr. Wilson explained to us how important it is to have perseverance as a writer, as most experience many rejections before they get to publish their first book. Our boys and girls also demonstrated a lot of interest in learning about the process of writing and illustrating and how these two are connected!

On Thursday then, we were blown away by Anne Glover, a storyteller extraordinaire. She captivated her audience with her beautiful stories, her authentic voice and... her string tricks! All of the students were so inspired at the end of the presentation and they all wanted strings and tell their own stories! After all... everyone is a storyteller! Strings can be ordered here.
Check out this little video that captures some of the magic:

What a great week it was!
We did also create some wonderful watercolour art and shared our favourite books with the class.

Next week should be equally fun as we are getting ready to visit the Chinese School in Chinatown in Downtown Victoria on Wednesday! All of the permission forms have been come back (Thank you!) and everyone is excited about a fun day of learning about a different culture and of course, spending time with our little buddies from Ms. Walker's class!

CTV Weather School Visiting Our Classroom

Amazing day today with CTV Weather School visiting our classroom! Thank you to Astrid Braunschmidt and her team for teaching us about the weather and making us look good on TV!! All of the kids were very engaged and some of us got to try out the green screen and tell weather stories. If you missed the broadcast this evening, here is a link to it...

CTV in Ms. van der Leeden's Grade 4 Class

 

 

... and here are some more pictures from this great day of learning:

 





Beans in the Jeans

This week was a bit tiring and not always as productive as we like it to be, as we found that many of our students had "beans in their jeans" and had a hard time to settle down. This made it more difficult to focus on school work listen to instruction. We decided to pick up our daily runs again and head outside before lunch for a few laps around the field. This seems to really help our boys and girls to release some excess energy.
We did work hard in Math though and went through a lot of extra practice to become more proficient with fractions. The quiz was postponed to Monday, January 27, and it will cover a small section of multiplication basic facts and an assessment of the students' understanding of fractions.
In Science our students designed some amazing weather instruments, and we learned about wind, wind speed and barometric pressure. Here is a great pic (courtesy of Vienna's mom) showing two students working on their weather vane model:

All of us had fun testing our weather instruments outside on Friday. There was not a lot of wind, but we did manage to get some data. Here are four of our students with their barometer models:

 

Did you know that next week is LITERACY WEEK at Ruth King Elementary? We are so excited, I asked all students to bring their favorite book (can be a picture book, a chapter book, a fiction or non-fiction book) to school on Monday. Each day of the week five different students will introduce their favourite book to the class! But there is more... Here are some highlights from Literacy Week:

On MONDAY we will engage in a 10 minute school wide reading session after the Monday Morning Assembly. On TUESDAY we will be participating in a workshop with author Troy Wilson. On WEDNESDAY we are looking forward to learning about the writing process from Dana White, publisher from the Paper Mache publication. On  THURSDAY we have scheduled another exciting workshop with storyteller Anne Glover and it will be "Dress Up As Your Favourite Book Character Day"! This should be fun! Finally, on FRIDAY is "Poem in Your Pocket Day"!. Can't wait for all the excitement! If you want to support Literacy Week at home, you might want to try this READO-Bingo activity!

Have fun and don't forget to ready with  your child and to your child every day!

Last but not least, we are adding one more exciting guest speaker presentation to our full program next week, as we are inviting CTV into our classroom on Wednesday. Please remember to tune into CTV News with Hudson Mack at 6:00 pm (Shaw or Optic TV on Channel 12) on Wednesday, January 29 and watch for the Division 4 Ruth King Weather School with Astrid Braunschmidt to be featured on air! You will also be able to see the visit at http://vancouverisland.ctvnews.ca/weather/weather-school. Here is to learning outside the box!!!

 





Busy Week

Last week was very busy and it seemed to have buzzed by quickly, and it is hard to believe that the second half of January is already upon us! Wow, time does fly when you are having fun! As you can see from our beautiful bulletin above, the students created some gorgeous watercolour pictures of birch trees. They experimented with shadows and different mediums, including charcoal, pencil (for shading) and of course water colour! The results are pretty stunning and I invite you to come by our classroom and see for yourself!

We also had the opportunity to participate in a curling workshop that was offered at Ruth King on Tuesday last week. One of the instructors, Tula, from the Westshore Recreation Centre came and introduced our class to curling, the terminology and the game's rules. We even got to play a few games and everyone enjoyed themselves.



In Math, we started our unit on Fractions and we are getting ready for a quiz on Thursday, January 24. We continue to practice our multiplication basic facts and often play math games likes Bingo and Yahtzee to keep our mental math brain sharp!
In Social Studies we worked on a fun project to showcase our (multi-) cultural backgrounds. Here are some of our students working in their groups on this creative project:

At the end of the week, we met with our little buddies in Ms. Walker's class and helped them create some snowflakes for their windows. We also enjoyed some hot chocolate with marshmallows; although Ms. van der Leeden really needs to learn how to prepare the drinks.... THREE teaspoons of hot chocolate powder PER CUP!!! Next time it will taste better...I promise!
Next week we have more fun activities planned. I am mostly looking forward to sharing all of the amazing Science projects you completed at home this weekend. Almost all of our students built a weather instrument and we are eager to test it and learn more about wind and air pressure. Here is an amazing weather vane created by Katie and Kianna - a little taste of what's to come:



 

Happy New Year!

Hope you and your families enjoyed a restful and happy Christmas holiday and you feel energized and excited about what the new year has to offer. It is so good to be back in the classroom and my students already amazed me during this first week back with some incredible writing pieces, reflecting on goals and resolutions for the new year. Check this out:

Thoughtful. Honest. Powerful. Well done, Division 4!

Please note that in Math we will be starting a new unit on Fractions. Most of our students have made excellent progress with regards to the recall of the multiplication basic facts, and I can tell that many of you supported the learning of this important foundational skill at home. We will continue to practice our "quick math facts" first thing in the morning to get our brains fired up! Keep practicing at home!

 

Merry Christmas

As I am just about to board the plane to spend the holidays with my family in Germany, I thought I would post a couple of pictures to show you some of the great things our class was up to in these last three weeks. December at Ruth King came and went by so fast that I didn't get the chance to post on my blog every week. There was just too much to do .... my apologies! But I do hope that you enjoy this quick review of some of the highlights in our classroom.

As you can see from the picture above, the bottom of our beautiful classroom tree filled up very quickly with gifts and everyone was very excited for our gift exchange on the last day of school. But before that we enjoyed an amazing Winter Concert, where our class was able to showcase its great musical talent! Wow, what a wonderful show it was and I was very proud of our boys and girls, who demonstrated good role modelling to our younger students, even though they were quite excited and a little nervous themselves.

Spirit Days are always a hit in our classroom and we all were very excited about Pajama Day with an afternoon movie in the gym.

We also had two days of snow, even though some of us would have liked to see some more, we enjoyed the distraction. Lots of singing in the classroom and several art activities made the days go by very quickly.

We spent quite a bit of time with our little buddies in Ms. Walker's class this month, but my favourite one was definitely the day we went swimming to the Commonwealth Pool and then finished the day with a Christmas Party with our little buddies! It was so much fun and again, everyone demonstrated some good leadership and mentoring of our younger friends. Then finally the much anticipated last day of school arrived and all of the Division 4 students participated in a very special classroom meeting. We discussed the true meaning of giving, generosity and kindness. Then we proceeded to open the gifts from our Secret Santa...one by one each student opened their gift and the class watched in a supportive and very caring manner. It was very touching to see that everyone put a lot of thought into their gift and it was quite amazing to see some of the reactions of the recipients, who were so delighted and grateful. There was definitely a little bit of magic in the air...see for yourselves:





With these beautiful smiles I will sign off, wishing you and your loved ones all the best for the holiday season! Merry Christmas and I will see you in 2014!