Living In Canada

This month in Theme Studies, we are learning about Living In Canada. Ms Wiens, our student teacher, is teaching us this unit.  We started off by learning about the Canadian flag.  We read a story called "Our Canadian Flag", we watched a Historica vignette about the Canadian flag and when it came into existence (watch the vignette here: Flags | Historica - Dominion ).  We had to draw the Canadian flag from our memory.

This is us concentrating on drawing the Canadian Flag from memory

We also learned about the different provincial and territorial flags.  We learned about these flags on the SMART board.  We did a matching activity where we looked at pictures of the flags on the SMART board and matched them to their province or territory name.

Ms Wiens using the SMART board

We designed our own flags, to represent our classroom, after we brainstormed ideas about our classroom.  Our flags had to include symbols that are important to our class. We added colors that we thought symbolized our classroom. 

We wrote a paragraph that would become our speech for why our flags should be voted as the official class flag.  Our speech had to describe our flag and why we included certain symbols or colors.  Our election speech was delivered to the class in order to convince other students to vote for us. 

Here are a few samples of our speeches:

After the speeches we held an election to decide which flag would become the official flag of room 16.  An election is done in secret.  Each person in the class was given a ballot, we had to mark an 'X' in the box for the candidate that we wanted to win.  A ballot could be spoiled if you marked it incorrectly, like if you put a check mark instead of an 'X' or if you put an 'X' in two boxes.  It is important not to spoil your ballot so that your vote counts in the election. 

Here we are listening to how to cast a vote

Following the vote, the ballots were tallied and the design that was chosen is represented below with the speech accompanying it:

Written as shared writing by the students of room 16, Ms Wiens and Ms Blacker