We Believe In...

This video is about the things that we believe in in our classroom.  We have class beliefs to keep us safe and to remind us to be respectful students.  We hope you enjoy our video! 

Our video "We Believe In..."

Posted by the students of Room 16

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

It's Been A While... Here's an Update!

We've been really busy and have not had a moment to blog.  Here's what has been going on in our room.  One week we couldn't post at all because Ms Blacker was in Dallas for a math conference.  Now we're going to be math nerds because she is a math smartie pants!!  The Winnipeg Jets Hockey Academy started a few weeks ago and that has kept us very busy too.  We've also been busy with other projects that are on the go... so here is a little bit information about some of the things we have been doing.

Downtown Dallas

Dealey Plaza in Dallas where President JFK was shot

Winnipeg Jets Hockey Academy

In theme studies we have been learning about Simple Machines and how they make jobs easier.  We know that a force is a push or a pull, we also know that there are six simple machines.  We used the design process to build vehicles.  Our vehicles had to include a wheel and axel because we rolled it down an inclined plane.  We tested the distance of our vehicles.  Quintin's vehicle went the furthest.  We discovered from this experiment that some wheels were too thin and didn't roll properly.  We also were amazed by the creativity of some students for the materials that they used, for example, Angelica cut wheels out of an old pair of her flip flops! 

Testing Our Simple Machine Projects

Mrs. Lamoureux hosted a very special event for Halloween, this event is "The Annual Great Pumpkin Olympics"!  All the grade 4/5s participated in various relays, races and some very messy pie eating contests!  Everyone had a great time!  Thank you Mrs Lamoureux for a wonderful event! 

Ghost Rider Race

Listening to Instructions

First Place Pie Eater! 

Written as shared writing by Room 16 Students and Ms Blacker

Indigo For The Love Of Reading

For the last few weeks our school has been "adopted" by Chapters Polo Park as a fundraiser for our new Learning Commons (library).  It was an exciting few weeks as we watched the number of people adopting our school grow online.  My class often visited the Indigo site to see the names of adopters and were amazed by how many people we knew.  Many other staff, like Mrs. JR or Ms Armstrong would often pop in as we were on the site and they would tell us a bit about some of the people they knew on the list.  One day Mrs. JR said she didn't recognize the name of the latest adopter/donator and I realized that it was our TIA artist's husband!  The students cheered because they felt a connection to someone they haven't even met yet...  I think that's one thing that I will really take away from this partnership with Chapters,  that it opened our eyes to the wonderful supporters we have and it made us feel connected to others by the generosity that they shared!  I'm not sure if people realize how much the love and joy of reading can change a life and open up a world of possibilities. 

I thank each of you who showed your support because putting books in our students hands is the best gift that can ever be given!  From the bottom of my teacher heart, thank you for making a difference!

Mr. FB would also like to share a special message: 

Congratulations on a very successful partnership during the last few weeks!

• Thanks to your efforts baking for the Chapters Polo Park store - which raised a significant amount of money for Indigo, the store was able to donate around 235 new books for our library! 
• Thanks to your efforts recruiting 'adopters' (of which the final number today is 672) our total number of books is at 325.  We are one of only 59 schools that made it to A+ status!
• This number puts us at #5 in Canada which does two things: 
• 1.  Adds an additional 50 books to our total!  (So now it will be 375 books!)
• 2.  Makes us one of 10 schools being considered for the $10 000.00 Library Makeover Prize!
• Thanks to the additional fundraising from the Ford Drive Event last June, Boston Pizza Home Reading Program, The St. James Optimist Club and the great auction event at Faithworks we will be reading our hearts out for some time!
• We will be adding these together for an assembly announcement the week after next!

On Friday, my class discussed how lucky we are to have such excellent supporters and we wanted to show our appreciation.  We decided that everyone in the class would use manipulatives to create a 'thank you' - 

 to the Landau Ford Drive Event

 to the Boston Pizza Home Reading

 to the St. James Optimist Club

 to Faithworks

 and to the many, many adopters and donators: 

Posted by Ms Blacker with guest appearance from Mr. FB and the Students of Room 16

We Are Thankful!

This week we are focusing on reasons we are thankful.  This topic fits naturally into the time of year as we celebrate Thanksgiving this coming weekend.  Thanksgiving is about spending time with the people you love and care about.  It is also an opportunity for us to reflect back on our previous experiences that we are thankful for in order to look forward to the future with hope and optimism.  We're taking the time this week to not only reflect, but to plan for future accomplishments.

We have continued to read Charlotte's Web which relates to the topic of being thankful, setting goals and developing friendships.  We've also read other books about giving thanks.  From those books and ideas that we brainstormed together, we came up with our own individual reasons to be thankful.  We wrote those ideas on a turkey feather and posted them in the hallway for others to see. 

We are thankful that we have our basic needs met with food and shelter.  Some people are not as fortunate.  So each year, our school collects food that we donate to people in need.  We like to help others in our community.  It is important for us to give back to those who help us.

On Friday, our school will celebrate Thanksgiving by having our annual Turkey Trot.  The Turkey Trot is an obstacle course that Mrs. Lamoureux and her helpers set up outside in our beautiful school grounds.  All of the students and staff at our school participate in this fun event together!  We play games together outside and do the 'Turkey Dance' with Thomas the Turkey!  Our school has the Turkey Trot because this is an opportunity for us to all spend time together in a joyful way!



This month, Ms Blacker brought in an albino pumpkin and a gourd for each table.  She brought it to decorate our class for the harvest season.  The pumpkin is SO big that we thought it might weigh more than the smallest person in our class.  So we did a little math activity where everyone guessed who would weigh more: the pumpkin or the smallest student.... Turns out that they both weigh the exact same amount!!! 

We hope that everyone takes a moment this week to give thanks.  We wish all our readers a very Happy Thanksgiving! 



Written as shared writing by the students of Room 16 and Ms Blacker

Who I Am

One day last week, Ms Blacker was talking to us and we were feeling a bit tired so she said "Show your SWAG!"  This got our attention and we thought it was pretty cool and funny that she said "SWAG"!  Then she said that this is what SWAG meant:

Showing our SWAG got the ball rolling for a lot of discussion and read alouds on "who we are" and "what we want to be"...  The activities that we have done always come back to the themes of 'trying our best' and showing RESPECT.  We created a "Y-chart" about what respect looks like, sounds like and feels like.  We came up with some really good thoughts.  Then Ms Blacker said that we should make sure that RESPECT becomes a focal point in our class so we created a big poster to remind us to always show respect.  Here is a picture of our poster:

(Each letter in our poster has pictures and words related to being respectful)

 (We worked in groups on our poster letters)

This summer Ms Blacker painted some pictures to decorate our classroom, these signs remind us to be the kind of people that we want to be... kind, respectful people, who try their best and celebrate each other!  These are the signs that hang in our classroom:

Some of Ms Blacker's teacher tweeps (those are people she follows on Twitter) sent her picture files that she framed in our classroom.  We like these pictures because they remind us about how much our teacher cares about us.  She wants us to feel welcome and comfortable in our classroom because it is our home away from home. 

We have read lots of books about friendship, dreams, team building and being a good person.  We always talk about the books we read and give examples about how the messages from these books fit into our classroom.  We know that we want to have fun and the best way to do that is to try our best and be kind.  Right now we're reading Charlotte's Web, we can relate to the book because the animals are developing friendships and helping each other out.  So are we!!!

We also read and talked about quilts.  Why?  You need all the pieces of fabric to fit together in a quilt in order for the blanket to do it's job.  Our class is like a quilt because we work together and provide each other with warmth and comfort.  Each of us made a popsicle stick square and we hung them on the wall to form a "quilt" - this art project looks really cool and shows how well we work... together!  (Ms Blacker will add a picture on Monday, we ran out of time today).

Lastly, this video has become our theme song - it fits well with the topics we have talked about.  We listen to it every day and sing along.  We want to make a video using this song!  We feel a lot of JOY when we listen to this song! 





Written as shared writing by Room 16 students with input from Ms Blacker

Aerobic Place Value

Aerobic Place Value cards are one of the most important visual tools that students can use repeatedly in the math classroom.  Aerobic Place Value cards are cards with numbers written on them in the 1s, 10s, 100s, and 1000s.  Our teacher handed out Place Value cards at random so that everyone got a mixture of different numbers and different place values.  Then Ms Blacker called out different numbers and the students with those cards came up to the front of the class to show the number to everyone else.  The cards are used to show expanded and standardized notation of numbers.  We started Aerobic Place Value with numbers up to 999.  After, we practiced with numbers in the hundreds we went on to the thousands.  

When our place value number was called, we went up and showed the expanded notation form

Then, we showed that same number in standard notation!

When a number is called like "Two-hundred seven" it is important to remember that the person with the "00" in the tens place value still come up to show their card!

Here is two-hundred seven in standard notation.

We liked this activity because we got to move around in math class.  Math class is not just about sitting at our spots, we like to have fun! Aerobic Place Value was fun! 

Here is what some of the kids had to say about this activity:

"It was awesome because we moved around while putting numbers together!" - Thomas
"Everybody got a chance to participate!" - Taylor
'We all shared the cards." - Charity

We hope to do Aerobic Place Value again! 

Written as a shared writing piece by the students of Room 16 with Ms Blacker