January happenings

It's been a busy month in Team Hummingbird! We returned from the Christmas break to a much welcomed sight - snow in the school yard! This led into some creative outdoor play, with many students playing Arctic animal games. We decided as a class to make a list of the facts we knew about the Arctic - I started by asking the students the question, what does arctic mean? We have helped the students expand what they already know by reading books and watching films about arctic animals, and learning the difference between the Arctic and Antarctic regions of the world. We're excited to see where this inquiry will take us!

Watching videos about arctic animals on Learn360

Since the return back to school, we have also begun our Journal Club. Students are invited to write in their journals - each student decides what he/she wants to write about. Sometimes it's simple phrases using our popcorn words, just popcorn words on their own, or pictures and stories to go along with them. The students are excited about their writing, and love sharing what they have written with their classmates during community sharing time.

We have recently begun exploring shapes in our class! Students have been going on "shape hunts" around the classroom, and have been exploring shapes in different contexts (i.e., using pattern blocks to create a picture, building with blocks of different shapes, etc.). The students have discovered that some shapes can be made up of other shapes (for example, a square can be made up of two triangles), and this led into a larger exploration of how different shapes connect together. We have started to look at how shapes are similar and different (some shapes have straight sides, some don't; number of sides, etc.). It's amazing to see the connections students have made between 2D and 3D shapes! We watched this video (Shape Song) and one JK student even commented about how a cone looked like a party hat, a cube looked like a rubik's cube, and a rectangular prism looked like a building! We will continue to explore 2D and 3D shapes all around us in the coming weeks.