Mrs.Cooper Grade3/4

O ne highlight from our week was mission impossible. We took all of our skills that we learned in gymnastics and used them to move through the Mission Impossible course. During gymnastics we learned about controlled body movements, balances, working through progressively hard movements and trying difficult things. Specifically we looked at the learning intentions: I can participate in risk-taking and adventurous play activities that promote well-being. I can participate in physical activities that increase in complexity. I can identify and implement personal strategies to overcome challenges in a variety of physical activities.  It was also support staff appreciation week. We did a caring project where we made a small gift to thank all the support staff in our school. We loved delivering them and telling all our special school staff what we appreciate about them! Another highlight was our work with Ms. Sharon. We were using spiral patterns in nature, particularly the Fibo...

W hen we look at the calendar we cannot believe that we are approaching the end of April!! It feels like our year is going so fast. However when Mrs. Cooper looks at the growth in our reading, writing, math and critical thinking skills, she can really tell how much work we have put in this year. The focus of our writing this week was on procedural writing with a continued emphasis on making our writing clear and interesting for our readers. We explored the use of various transition words to make our writing flow together and to make sure that it was interesting. We talked a lot about how writing should sound the way that we speak with interesting word choices and making sure it doesn’t sound like a list. Finally, we made sure that we had a topic sentence that introduced our paragraph, and then a concluding sentence that wrapped up our ideas. Another big focus of our week was developing healthy relationships and how to deal with “healthy conflict”. We talked about how conflict is no...

We are so excited about how our pysanky eggs turned out and we cannot wait to bring them home! When doing them we learned that it was harder than we thought it would be, that there are many steps to this process and that in the Ukrainian culture, each symbol has it’s own meaning. Did you know that a spiral means defense or protection, a ladder means prosperity, and roses mean love and caring? Before we decorated our own eggs, we did a pencil sketch plan using the symbols that represent us or our family, or wishes that we want for the future. Our eggs will come home this week, and Mrs. Cooper will send another message, however she wants to remind everyone that our eggs are raw and full! This means that each family has a few choices about what they want to do with the eggs: You can visit Pysanky Info: Emptying Eggs to learn how to hollow out the eggs. This is common in the Ukrainian culture (and what Mrs. Cooper’s family does). A slight warning, there is a possibility that the eggs c...

Happy Early Easter to those in our class who celebrate. A reminder that tomorrow, Friday April 7 is Good Friday so there is no school. Monday is also a learning day for teachers so we hope everyone enjoys and extra long weekend! We wanted to share that room 6 and room 5 are learning how to make psyanky eggs in Social Studies. Pysanky eggs are Ukrainian Easter eggs and they are part of their culture. This week we read three legends to explain why Psyanky is so important to the Ukrainian culture. The three legends were different, but also similar in some ways. All of them shared the message that it is important to spread love and kindness to friends, family and nature. We were lucky enough to share what we know about psyanky eggs with our kindergarten buddies on Thursday, and help them explore patterns while we decorated paper psyanky eggs with them. We also learned that we would be making our own pysanky eggs next week. Ms. Bouchard and Mrs. Cooper told us that if we are going to carry ...