Back-to-School Prep

 I'm sure most teachers will agree that back to school preparations, what with unit planning, familiarizing ourselves with new curricula, creating school plans, etc. can be a rather arduous and time consuming undertaking.  Still, there are some of us who add several other projects to our prep work, not necessarily because everything else is already completed or that we want our school year to run smoother.  Rather, we like feeding our creative streak and adding a bit more spark to the upcoming year be it for ourselves, out colleagues or students.   Below are some of the projest I indulged in, just because...

Chair Bags

Not sure why I'm not able to rotate this picture, but I trust you get it.

For years now I’ve provided chair bags for my students so that each of them can have several books on hand for whenever they finish their work early or arrive early.  Actually, I think a student said it best.  Once a school visitor asked about the bags and the student replied, “This is where we keep our books and when Elma answers the phone, we get to read.”  In short, whenever they have down time, there’s always a book or two on hand.

Earlier this year, a fellow Night Writer, after reading my sister Linda's newly published book "Hutterite Diaries", asked us if we would like fabric pieces for future quilting projects.  Of course we accepted them and he presented us with almost a dozen "books" of fabric samples from perhaps a drapery store.  So, the prints of this year's set of chair bags will be as varied as the personalities of the students that will use them: floral, checks, solids, bold and bright...  Since I made an extra one, each students will have a choice. 

 

Birthday Gifts

 

Many teachers present their students with a gift when their birthdays roll around.  Some bake cupcakes once a month to celebrate all  the birthdays happening in that month, while others present books or other small gifts.  For this year’s birthdays, I found something that’s all about the presentation: unique birthday smoothies!  I found the idea at: Monday Made It and decided to add my own twist to it with the items I selected to include in it: stickers, eraser, sharpener small writing tablet, balloon, candy, birthday bracelet.  To add the bubbles on top, I added a handful of Easter grass.  For the straw, I inserted a fancy birthday pencil.    I don’t think the total cost per gift was more than $2.00, but I’m sure my students will love them!

Gifts for Teachers

Typically each year, I leave a back to school gift on the desk each teacher at my school and also some of my teacher friends at other schools.  This year it’s several small items and each comes with a special message:

Sharpie, Marker or Highlighter sets

Fourth & Ten  gets the credit for this idea,

  Prescription

Thanks to Little Priorities for this cute idea. She used M&Ms but I used Smarties.  Teachers are smart people, right?  This is prescribed to ease various teacherish symptoms from curriculum overload to headaches to fatigue and more.

 

 

 

 

 Box of Rubber Bands

At our semi-annual back to school I was presented with several boxes of elastics – something all teachers use almost as regularly as the school bell.   I decided to add the following quote to each box: "Blessed are the flexible, for the will not be bent out of shape,"

 

  Cleaning Cloths

Of course, nothing says 'a new school year' like a newly serged set of cleaning cloths and towels!

May YOUR school year be bookish and bright, celebratory and sparkly!

What's part of your school year prep routine just because" ?

Symbols of Canada and Manitoba

Symbols of Canada 

My final social studies unit of the 2014-15 school year revolved largely around learning about Canadian and Provincial  (Manitoba) symbols.  Several times, as they learned about each symbol, I was able to present my students with a sticker, pin, bookmark or some sort of object to help them remember that particular symbol.
Almost every time they added loot to their Ziploc baggies, one of my students was sure to ask, "Can we take our bag home today?" We kept them until the last day of school and the excitedly clutched their bags as they embarked upon their summer vacation.  This Canada Day they could proudly wave their flag and wear a Canadian flag pin.

RCMP Guest Speaker

One of the guest speakers for this unit was an RCMP officer, Constable Moyer from our local RCMP detachment.  She arrived in plain clothes and I had totally not expected that.  It didn't take her long however, to convince us that she knew her job.  After spending about an hour presenting on her job and locking several students in handcuffs, she allowed our students to "check out" her truck and did they ever! I believe every bell, whistle and siren was experimented with.

Pins of Manitoba

 After emailing our MLA, Mr. Ian Wishart about our project, I received a beautiful package of pins - all of them symbols of Manitoba, for each student as well as a lovely bookmark depicting the Manitoba Legislative Buildings. Each pin was accompanied with a brief write-up on the symbol.  I created a close activity for each symbol which I made available both for the SMART board and the students' booklets.

 

Legislative Buildings 

I believe every student should have at least one tour of thee legislative buildings and I cannot think of a better time to do this than after they've studied about provincial symbols.  When we had our annual year-end field trip, it seemed that every symbol from the golden boy atop the dome to the bison bracketing the grand staircase to the limestone Union Jack symbols bordering the second story walkway, all of them spoke to my class of first and second graders perhaps even more than the older students.

Manitoba Legislative Buildings

I believe the combination of in-class lessons, mementos, guest speaker and field trip will make this social studies unit one that will not be forgotten soon!

SmArts 2014-15 Part 3

Chalk Pastels

Our final classes introduced students to the delightful realness and the great results of working with Chalk Pastels.   

 

Elephants and Dragon Flies

The younger student's chalk pastel project were a dragonfly and a baby elephant playing with a big ball.  
 






 


 The older class project was a large African scene featuring both an authentic adult African elephant and tree.  The pastel chalk medium lent itself to creating very believable skin for the elephants bringing them to life on both projects.  

Self Portraits

Janelle - Grade 1

After our first exposure to working with chalk pastels we moved on to pastel self portraits.   In hindsight this was a very advanced level project requiring many hours of one on one, hands on assistance, and in the end some fine tuning via the instructor with the student present.  

Daniel - Grade 1

The sum total of all efforts of students, Brennan School teachers and EA's were certainly worth it.  Our instructor, Carol Barbeau, felt that the basic lesson of bringing to life each student's image registered with each of the children at their individual level of learning.   

Joel - Grade 4

The lesson taught how very important details are. Students learned to seriously think about their own eye color and other details of their eyes, and the unique, individual shape of lips, head, ears, hair, the special shape and hair of eyebrows, skin tone, plus the simple few strokes that create their nose.

Nicole - Grade 6

Once completed, we framed the self portraits and the students presented them to their dads as Father's Day gifts.
























Thanks Carol for volunteering your time to spend several one-on-one classes with our students to see the projects to completion.  Also, I appreciate your input in this blog post!

Norway House

In Grade 2, Cluster 2 social studies, students learn about Canadian Communities.  This year I was fortunate on two accounts.  Firstly, our speech pathologist, who also works at Norway House, helped me connect with a grade 2 teacher (April Anderson) in HBOIERC School; therefore, we studied that community.  April and I discussed our unit of studies and decided to write a book modeled after David Bouchard`s book, If You`re Not From the Prairie.  Hence If You`re Not From Norway House and If You`re Not From Elm River were born.  We did our projects in the form of a PowerPoint, so it would be easier to send to each other`s schools.  We also completed a comparison chart on our own community with information based on the Learning Experiences outlined in the grade 2 curriculum.

Lapbooks

After receiving the PowerPoint and comparison chart, I decided to have my students create a lapbook to record some of the facts and interesting details about Norway House.  This was the first time I`d worked with a lapbook. There are oodles of ideas and templates available on line; however, it seems to me that most of them require tons of photocopying, cutting and pasting, not to mention hordes of scrap paper in the end.  I wanted to avoid all of that, so I did my own version of it using paper cut-offs which a friend gets from a printer, and made various foldables and booklets.  We included a comparison chart, "brochure" on Norway House, travel and education info, and a section on what we learned from Mrs. Boychuk. (See below for more information about her.) The library pocket contains a temporary National Aboriginal Day tattoo and bookmark.

Presentation

Secondly, my supervisor helped me connect with the librarian at La Verendrye School in Portage la Prairie.  She grew up in Norway House and graciously agreed to prepared a PowerPoint presentation (with the help of her husband Mr. Scott Boychuk) and display especially for my class.  Mrs. Ila Boychuk even volunteered to bake bannock for us!  We were invited to the LVS library for the event and it proved to be a wonderful culmination to our unit on Norway House.  Having this presentation at the end of the unit was great as the students already had some knowledge and had prepared some questions of information they still wanted to learn about Norway House.  All of us left with a new awareness and appreciation of this northern Manitoba community and a longing to visit it someday.

Dream Catchers

An Aboriginal craft activity my class also did was create simple dream catchers.  I combined ideas from two different Pinterest sites: Dream Catcher - 1 and Dream Catcher 2. What I liked about the second link is the instructions on creating the web section of the dream catcher - it`s similar to string art.

National Aboriginal Day

One of the events celebrated in Norway House is National Aboriginal Day.  I believe each school receives a package of information on this celebration each spring which includes activity booklets and bookmarks.  I still had mine from a previous year, so it was much more meaningful to my students when I handed them out as we were studying about an Aboriginal community.  They felt the booklets and bookmarks were sent to them directly from Norway House!

Having the above mentioned connections enabled me to teach this unit in a real-world, meaningful manner.  No matter how great books, websites and videos are, it`s the human connection that makes all the difference in the world!

SmArts 2014-15 Part 2

In our second term, the focus of our SmArts classes was painting with water colours and acrylics. 

Intermediate Class

Northern Lights

The Northern Lights are always fascinating for all ages.  The 

dropped dynamic colors onto wet paper and let it soar down the page, blending and moving like real Northern Lights. The movement of color created their art.

Butterflies

The Butterflies were a lesson in mirrored imaging, beauty and selecting colors that work well.    It is a lesson of detail, balance and fosters awareness and appreciation of the value of insects. We used 6" x 8" mounted canvases from Dollarama for this project.  As soon as the paint was dried, the paintings were ready to display.

 

 Primary Class

Metallic Owls

Our Metallic Owls introduced the students to Folk Art.  The owl is created by applying a raised glue surface, and the lesson teaches the importance of detail and shape. Each student chose either copper, gold or bronze metallic paint and when applied, it gave their image the appearance of hammered metal.  Similar to the butterflies above, the owls were painted on mounted canvases from Dollarama for this project. 

Children in the Rain

The "Children in the Rain" were easily relatable and appealing for young students.   How fun to paint the umbrellas and raincoats.  The last addition to our painting was rain.  Each student determined which direction their rain was coming from and learned to apply it very consistently, maintaining believable rainfall.

Thanks to our art instructor, Carol Barbeau for providing the descriptions of these projects.

School Year Timeline

Our Local Community

My first social studies unit of the year was "Our Local Community" from the grade 2 curriculum.  During this unit, students learn about timelines.  They first create their own, then move on to working on a community timeline.  As part of this process, when my friend Kathy and I planned this unit, we decided to also have our students create a school year timeline. Our idea for this was inspired by this Pinterest site: Class Timeline.  Of course this is an on-going year-long project.  So of often when  a unit is over, we tend to start the next one without thinking much about the previous one.  Therefore it took some discipline for me to continue with our school year timeline.  

We decided to do  two pages for each month and use 12" x 12" scrapbooking pages for them, so that at the end of the year we would actually have a timeline scrapbook of our school year. At the end of September my students and I discussed different events of the first month of the year.  I then went through my pictures and ordered what we would need.  It took several days for me to get them back.  Finally we proceeded to create our two pages of September. and posted them on our timeline bulletin board.

Pic Collage

By then I was already wondering about keeping this up month my month for the entire school year. Kathy and I chatted on the phone and she remembered an iPad App Kathy Waldner and introduced to us at ICHE 2014 - Pic Collage.  What a fabulous idea!! Thanks Kathy (both of you)!
With this free App, you can create collages easily and quickly.  You can choose from various layouts, backgrounds and shapes.  You can add photos, videos, text and stickers.  All in all, it's a splendid tool to use for our class timeline project.  It takes us about 20-30 minutes to select our photos and create our pages each month.  Since my class consists mostly of first graders we work on this as a group.  I understand the Kathy (or probably both of them have their 2nd and 3rd graders do use this App independently one they've been introduced to it. 

September 2014  to June 2015

Now that we're into summer holidays, our 2014 - 2015 School Timeline has also been completed.  After adding our June events and admiring the completed bulletin board, we compiled the entire project into a scrapbook which we keep in our school library. 

Scrapbook

 My students and I felt a sense of closure as we added the last page: a Wordle describing the events, projects and activities of  our school-year.  This project proved to be a great way to teach timelines and document our school year.  We may not create one every year, but I'll certainly keep it in mind for the years that I teach grade one social studies.

 Yearbook

The other day I chatted with my friend Ruth and she gave me another idea, "Typically our yearbook has mainly events and activities that took place at the end of the year, you could add your entire timeline and you'd have something from the September through to June."  What a great notion! If not in our yearbook, as we don't publish on each year, then we will certainly consider adding it to our Term 3 Brennan Bulletin.  Thanks Ruth!

SmArts 2014-15 Part 1

When I first started teaching here at Brennan School, a grant became available in our area to incorpoarate the arts into the rest of the curricula.  Funded by the JW McConnell Foundation, ArtsSmarts afforded schools and teachers to hire local artists, purchase art supplies and offer programming that otherwise might not be possible.
Modeled after this same program, Portage la Prairie School Division currently offers a similar program: SmArts.  This year, here at Brennan School, we've hired Ms. Carol Barbeau to teach three blocks of art classes, one per term.

Colour Mixing

Term 1 consisted of colours and collage.  In the first class students learned about mixing colours by creating either bubbles or balloons.  Primary coloured circles were strategically drawn on water colour paper using water colour pencils, some of the circles over lapped to create the secondary colours.

 Collage

Next, the students created a collage out of cardstock and construction paper.  Tracing, cutting and colour selection were a large part of this project.  As a finishing touch, students enjoyed decorating their bowl or vase with metallic stickers.

 

 

 

 

Water Colour Farm Scenes

Thirdly, the younger students created a country scene of grazing sheep complete actual wool.  The older students painted a similar scene with a barn. 







Second and Third Terms' projects will be posted as the terms' art projects are completed.