School's Out For Summer

It's been a sea of adventure and oceans of fun.

Have a great summer - we'll 'sea' you next school year!

Knit Together in Learning

Here we are doing fabric art - and learning to sew a straight line!  We each made one row of ten squares for our class quilt.  And even though every row is different, when you put the whole thing together, it is beautiful!

Field Trip Fun

To finish our social studies unit about community past and present, we headed down to our very own Magrath Museum.  Take a minute to check it out - they even have on old grade one schoolroom.

And we couldn't finish our plants and animals unit without a visit to the local fish pond.  We saw leopard frogs, water skeeters, and a water snake!

Mr. Sabey's Farm

Mr. Sabey had a farm E-I-E-I-O!

And on that farm he had some cows, E-I-E-I-O!

Thank you Mr. Sabey, for showing us the animals at your farm!

Spring, Summer, Winter, Fall

We adopted a class tree and watched it change through the seasons.  Here are winter and spring.  We named our tree Woody.

Garden City Greenhouses

Last Monday we took a field trip to a local business - Garden City Greenhouses.  This was one of the best experiences of our school year.  Here are some pictures of our adventure learning about plants from Cathy (the owner).  She let us each try a fresh, ripe tomato, and apparently you can eat pansies!  I didn't try one myself, but the kids who did said they were very sweet.

If you're in Magrath and want a neat place to go, you don't want to miss these greenhouses.

Look What Grew In Our Garden!

We did it!  We finished growing our plants.  Look how great they look - now we will take them home to plant in our own gardens.

Woolford Park

At the end of every school year, grade one heads to Woolford Park for a day of science and art centers, and to celebrate a successful year.  Thank you to everyone involved!

What Does a Plant Need to Grow?

Because we are learning about plants in science, we decided to do a science experiment.  We learned that plants need dirt, water, sun and air to grow healthy and green.  So we decided to try growing seeds without some of these important things.  

We grew without dirt:  In a cup all alone, in grass, in shale, in sand, in water and in rocks (all in the picture above).  Can you guess what might happen?

Here are the seeds that will get everything they need (above).

Would you believe it?  The seeds sprouted that we planted in shale and in rock, but not in the other cups.

We had a grade four student who is conducting a similar experiment with bean seeds come and show us his results.  How interesting!

Swimming in a Sea of New Knowledge

In our painting unit for art we experimented with different watercolor techniques.  For our sea turtle project, we used salt to help the wet colors bleed into each other, allowing a flowing water effect, like that created by swimming turtles.  Check out some of our Wow! work:

Pitch-In

This past month our school got involved in the Pitch-in project.  We worked together to clean our community of litter.  Here we are walking around our assigned grids, doing our part to pitch-in!

Sprouting Seeds of Knowledge

We're growing plants in grade one science.

Tuesday we planted the seeds and gave them their first drink.

Here we are journaling our experience:

Now we wait, watch and predict what is happening - how long with the plants take to grow?  Which will grow the fastest and the tallest?  We are so excited to see the results!

Fishy Math

I have been participating in some professional development activities this year involving math.  One of those is a math cohort group that meets about once a month since February in the evenings to improve our math teaching skills.  At our last meeting we were each given a piece of literature and asked to implement it in our classroom to meet the curriculum and expand upon the new skills we have gained.

Here is our book:

We decided to live our story (of course, real piranhas are out of the question, but we had fun imagining!)

We came up with some interesting math understandings:

Spring Gardens

Someday, this work will be famous....