December 12th, 2014.

We were very fortunate to work with one of our parents to create sculptures out of reused materials.  Repurposing items from ‘Habitat for Humanity’s Restore Shop’ helped our students understand that there are many ways to use objects and materials.  While the students all had access to the same materials, the sculptures are all incredibly different.  It was wonderful to watch the creativity and problem solving that came out of the building process.  Our sculptures are displayed in the front hallway.  Please come by and take a look.

Here are a few of the sculptures.

We had a wonderful time recreating a day in a one-room schoolhouse.  Many students really got into the role and dressed for the day.  We began with stories of our morning chores and our long journeys to school.  We created “slates” to complete our work on, read from our “readers” and wrote with straight pens and ink.  A highlight of our day was making our own butter, which we enjoyed on a fresh bun. 

Working on our slates

More work with our slates

Enjoying our homemade butter

December 4th, 2014

Welcome to Room 4's new blog!

We were excited by the arrival of our second kit from the Glenbow Museum.  The kit is centered around one room school houses in Alberta from the early 1900's.  The students were excited to explore photographs, documents and artifacts and were surprised how much education has changed over the last 100 years.  Did you know that families often took turns boarding the teacher and that the teacher usually shared a room with the students!  We spent time exploring, sketching and writing about the artifacts.  Here are some examples of sketches that the students created.

We will continue exploring the artifacts and learning about life in a one room school house next week.  On Friday, we will create a one room schoolhouse in our classroom.  Students are encouraged to dress the part!

The Libretto for our school Opera, "The Wilds" was unveiled this week.  It is a fantastic story filled with interesting characters including ninja ballerinas, zombies and frogs with mustaches.  We had the opportunity to work with the composer, listening to a variety of Operas and identifying the feelings each evoked.