Speech Arts

Each spring communities across Manitoba and Canada host an arts festival where students and adults gather to showcase their progress and abilities in various disciplines such as piano, singing and speech arts. 
Prairie Sounds Festival is held in Portage la Prairie each April and usually students from four different colonies participate: Baker, Elm River, Fairholme and Good Hope.
Here at Brennan School, enroll all of our kindergarten to grade 8 students in speech arts.  For weeks they work on reading,  memorizing, then presenting their poems with clarity, good expression and poise.  Of course, participating in this project improves their articulation and oral language skills.  Furthermore, they develop skills in stage presence and confidence.
This year three Brennan students received awards: Jenna Waldner in kindergarten, her sister Ava waldner in grade 2 and Marcus Hofer in grade 8.

And the winners are...

At the final concert, all award winners present their pieces in front of a large and attentive audience.

Speech arts award winners representing four different colonies.

All the award winners of the Prairie Sounds Festival 2018

Ordinals

I started writing this post around Christmas time or shortly after, but for some reason it wasn't published, so here goes...

As usual, a month or so before Christmas, we bring out our boxes of Christmas library books.  It's always fun to watch the students find their favourites, then delve into others.  I typically also pick through and search for some of my personal favourites to read to my class.  This year it occurred to me that we have several versions of "The Twelve Days of Christmas" and that I could use them in my math class.  Yes! I decided to use those books to introduce ordinal counting.

 

After reading  the books and discussing that math concept, we did several activities including
1) counting the ordinals orally: first, second, third...
2) having the students line up and asking students them where they stand in the line -up.
3) sequencing ordinal cards from first to twelfth
4) play concentration and/or go fish with ordinal cards
5) following directions sheets pertaining to ordinals,..