Thank you and happy summer!

Well, summer certainly has arrived!  We may have had the hottest Canada Day long weekend that I can remember.  I had a wonderfully relaxing weekend.  I got to sleep in and read, eat lunch at a food truck, walk the seawall, have ice cream, and watch the fireworks at Canada Place!

I wanted to say thank you to everyone for the lovely class gift.  I am saving the gift card for the spa to pamper myself at the beginning of August.  Just in time for my birthday, and before Justin and I go to South Africa for our belated honeymoon!  In the meantime, I am back at UBC taking classes for my teacher-librarianship diploma.  The courses are packed into three weeks, but I am happy to be a student instead of a teacher for a little while.  I am going to try to find the time to share interesting links as I come across them.

So… if you haven’t signed up for the Burnaby Public Library’s summer reading club, do that first!  It’s free, you get stickers and a record booklet, and the kids have a chance to earn a medal by reading 50 nights.  The theme this year is “Up, Up and Away!” so get flying!

What we’re reading… poems, poems, and more poems!

We have started a unit on poetry, which the students are loving!  I found some great books at the McGill library, I actually walked out with a stack, far more than would fit in my book bag!  A few favourite books so far are “Take Me Out of the Bathtub” by Alan Katz , the “You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You” series by Mary Ann Hoberman, “My Hippo Has the Hiccups” by Kenn Nesbitt, and of course, all the Shel Silverstein books.

We wrote a class poem which we shared at the volunteer tea this afternoon.  It was inspired by “You Read to Me, I’ll Read to You”, but instead of only two voices, we had two groups of voices.  We brainstormed a list of all the things the parents do for our school, then used those ideas to write our poem.  We made sure to put in lots of tasty words, and the class had fun reading them with expression!

If you’d like to explore creating your own poetry, the Magnetic Poetry site has a fun tool.  I made a nonsense poem, you can read it here!

Virtual Math Manipulatives

The National Library of Virtual Manipulatives has some great online math activities.  The Grade Twos have been working on geometry and the Grade Ones have been doing measurement, so here are a few activities you might want to explore.

Geoboards – build shapes by stretching elastic bands onto the pegs

Pattern Blocks – use the blocks to create designs and patterns, you can even change the colours!

Tangrams – try to cover different shapes using the same 7 blocks