We are so lucky at our school to have a healthy breakfast waiting for us each morning. Thank you to the parent volunteers who help to make this happen as well as to all our funding partners who make it possible. After fueling up, we headed to the gym and learned how to play "Krazy Kickball". Its a kickball game where when a student gets tagged out, the fielding team must try to run and touch the batting team's wall, while the batting team must race for the dodgeballs and try to tag the fielding team. If they do, they stay up to bat. If the fielding team gets to the batting wall first, the teams switch. Confusing at first but crazy and fun once we get the hang of it. We stayed a little longer in the gym since no one came to kick us out- why not? An extra 15 minutes of gym? We'll take it! Back to the room for our final LA assessment on reading comprehension and then away to library where Mrs. Thorson read us a story themed around Remembrance Day.
Next, we had computers and worked on our actual keyboarding skills. It is hard to learn to keep our fingers on the home row keys, but we're trying really hard. In math we discussed estimating. It was supposed to be on our term 1 assessment but I don't feel it would be fair as the students have just been introduced to it. As a result, this is a skill we will work on in term 2, but after some lessons, we did that portion of the assessment together. Come social class we reveiwed things we knew about India; geography, flags, symbols, the poverty issues. Then we began to watch a short video on the culture of India. It was neat to see the similarities and differences between there and here. Mrs. Elliot joined us for our second step program and we discussed the similarities and differences between our partners. It was neat to learn about things we both like and then things that our parters could teach us if we wanted.
Such yummy lunches! It was great to see the friendship happening over our lunch time. The warm weather has brought out some wiggles in us. DEAR has been challenging for this group. Our school, like many others, attempts to have a 30 minute block of time in which the students can independent read books of interest. This develops good reading habits and attitudes but can be challenging for some to focus. As we are getting into chapter books in grade three it is important that we can focus and "watch the movie" of the story unfold in our head - hard to do with commercials every 2 minutes! We still have students walking around, talking, sharing books, and generally disrupting the reading of everyone. Sadly, we had to lose our read around the room option. But once we show we can read at our spots appropriately, we will earn it back. I'm sure it won't take long! Once we settled into our reading, Rylan even found things about India and Peru in one of the books he was reading.
Finally we were on to our agenda and then a Science/Art project. We are taking our science rocks and creating our own Dojo pet out of them. We hope to then write a story in LA about the adventures our Dojo pets get up to one day soon! After clean up and some GoNoodle dancing, we headed home! See you tomorrow!