Thursday 27 June 2013

Our Final Goodbye!

Dear King Cobras!

You are a very special group,
And  . . .  you should know
How I loved to be your teacher
And how fast the year did go!

Make friends and have fun
As through the grades you grow
Try hard to learn all you can
There is so much to know

The thing I tried to teach you
To last your whole life through
Is to know that you are special
Just because you are you!

Author Unknown

Love, Mrs. Betts

Enjoy your summer!  Don't forget to write on your blog, I'll be checking it regularly!

Saturday 22 June 2013

Architects, City Planners and Construction Workers!

We have been learning about the needs of a community.  We know that each community provides people with a place to live (shelter), ways to move from place to place (transportation), a place to have fun (recreation), people, places and things that help them stay safe (safety) and places to buy things (services).  We also learned there are different kinds of communities - farming, fishing, forestry, mining, tourism.  Once we had done some learning we began to create our own community. We spent many days building with lots of different materials.


Have you ever been to 4Cats for an art class?



Gas, anyone?

Signs, signs, everywhere there are signs!
When are construction work was done we started to learn how a community is organized!  We had lots of discussion about how our own Ocean Park Community is organized.  Then the fun began ~ we started to place our buildings and roadways on our community board.



Can you see the lake with the motor home beside the lake?  There is also a person sitting outside the motor home beside a campfire! 








We have a mall, a dentist office and a vet in our community!

Taking a flight?  Get to the airport by skytrain!


 Can you see the airplane and skytrain?



Our final community!  Would you like to live in our community?

Wednesday 12 June 2013

Save Our Sharks


 Today we were fortunate to have a fantastic shark presentation by Ben and his mom.  They spent a year in Florida and while they were there they became aware of how endangered sharks were and what we can do to save them.  Our presentation started off during our lunchtime. We watched a presentation and video and learned lots of facts about sharks!
At the beginning of the presentation Ben's mom put the time on the board.  We weren't really sure why but at the end of the presentation we found out!  Our presentation was 58 minutes long ~ we then multiplied that by 60 to get the number of seconds it was (it was 3480 seconds long).  Then we multiplied that by 3 because there are 3 sharks killed every second in the world.  We found out that during our presentation there were 10, 440 sharks killed!  We were stunned!
Meet SOS  Save Our Shark!



Did you know that there are over 100 million sharks killed every year!

Exploration time!  Time to share and chat about what we learned . . .

Look at this shark tooth!

Some of the lessons learned today. . . .
-don't eat shark fin soup
-sharks are an endangered species
-there are three sharks killed every second
-we need to protect our sharks!

Did you know that sharks are becoming an endangered species?

A HUGE thank you to Ben and his mom for a wonderful and informative presentation.  We learned a lot and had fun too!

Tuesday 11 June 2013

Shapes Alive!

We have been learning about 2D and  3D shapes!  Last week we used our iPads to create a Pic Collage about shapes.  Today we used play dough to make 3D shapes. Once we had made a cone, cylinder, cube, rectangular prism, and a sphere,  Mrs. Betts gave us a challenge to see if we could make a 3D structure that included all of those shapes.  Here are some of our structures.  Some of us then had time to use our iPads to take a picture and label our structures using Skitch. 








                                                     Can you name the shapes we used? 


This says it all!

Sunday 9 June 2013

A Busy Friday!

Today was a busy day in our classroom.  We started with Noisy Reading and many of us checked out the Wonder of the Day ~  all about Sea Dragons!  Once our parents left we worked on an art project.  First we toured the art done by some of our friends in Grade 3 and then we looked at pictures cityscapes on the iPad.  We are studying geometry and community so we were looking at not only the shapes and sizes of buildings but also the kinds of buildings that are in a city.  Then it was time to create!  We used only a ruler, paper and glue!  The only time we were allowed to use a pen was to add the final touches to our buildings~ Here is a sampling of our cityscapes.





Tuesday 4 June 2013

A First ~ Independent blogging!

This was our first year blogging and today was such a proud moment for me!  We had 4-5 different groups blogging for different reasons and doing it independently!  Some were responding to a parent who had commented on our animal research books and who had helped them and others were commenting on blogs from our blogging community.  Here are some pictures of us working hard in our groups.