Thursday 14 November 2013

October Projects

Science was made SPOOKY for the month of October.  Check out our magnet creations!


Restitution Evening

Team 25 did an amazing job writing a Restitution book called,  The 4 Basic Needs.  What was even more impressive was that we were able to pose for all the photos for the book within half an hour!  A big thank you goes out to Julia, who presented our book at the Parent Restitution Evening.  Also, congratulations to Cyrus and Gaby, members of the school's Bully Busters team, who did a fabulous job with their speaking parts that night.




We Scare Hunger

On October 28th, our school participated in a project called WE SCARE HUNGER.  This was one of many events designed to involve our students in local and global initiatives to build citizenship and understanding of service to others.  Students were able to come dressed as an action hero if they brought a food donation for Winnipeg Harvest.  This was also a great connection to what we have been studying in our class during Social Studies!

Tuesday 22 October 2013

Les Jours de la Semaine (The Days of the Week)

During French class we have been singing a song to help us remember the days of the week (les jours de la semaine).  The song is to the tune of The Flinstones theme song.  To watch the Youtube video and hear the song, click the following link.

NOTE: I have no control over what content appears on advertisements that appear prior to Youtube videos, therefore, I recommend that you chose "skip ad" if one appears.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xVHzu60QVKI

Monday 21 October 2013

The Integrated Arts-Lesson 2

Today we learned how to make "Busts".....or "clay-heads",  as we call them.  It pretty much took us an hour to blend the clay to get the right colour for our skin tone, shape the face and head and form eyeballs.  Let's just say that our sculptures look a little freaky right now!




Wednesday 16 October 2013

The Integrated Arts

We have had the opportunity to have a guest artist come work with us in our classroom.  David Perrett is an accomplished multimedia visual artist and sculptor.  One of the art pieces he created is the bus shelter sculpture on Ellice Ave in front of the University of Winnipeg.  On David's first visit, he had the students draw their self-portraits.





Thursday 3 October 2013

Race to 100

In grade 3, students work with numbers up to 1000.  That means we are working a lot with 3-digit numbers.  To re-familiarize students with place value and base ten blocks, we played a game called Race to 100.  What are "Base Ten Blocks"?  They are manipulatives that represent the ones, tens, hundreds and thousands.  These hands-on objects are an excellent way to help students understand place value and the concept of regrouping.




Team 25

Team 25 is settling into our classroom routines and we have come up with a list of "Classroom Beliefs".  During the last month of school, we have spent a lot of time reviewing these beliefs and talking about what they look like in our room.  Here is the list we came up with:

Wednesday 18 September 2013

Moving On

After 12 great years of teaching grades 3, 4 and 3/4 multiage, at Heritage School, it was time to change things up a bit.  It was incredibly hard to say good bye to all the students, families and staff who had become such an important part of my life. I have learned a tonne over the years and have so many awesome memories from Heritage School.

On the other hand, I am very excited to be starting this new chapter of my career at Strathmillan School.  All of the staff and families have been so welcoming and I feel very fortunate to be joining such an amazing school!

Sunday 21 July 2013

My Farewell Video

Thank you to all the teachers and students who were involved in making this video. It means so much to me. A special thanks to Mr. B who made it all possible and also seemed to find every possible photo of me during my pregnancy years. :)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s2KNC5GzHZw

Saturday 1 June 2013

My Hockey All Stars

, Noah, this post is for you.  It has taken me WAY too long to get these hockey pics on the blog.  Several of the students who attend Heritage School have been fortunate enough to have participated in the Winnipeg Jets Hockey Academy this year.  I was able to sneak away from school to watch the progress they had made on the ice a few times.  The students from our class who got to skate every Wednesday at the Ice Complex were Noah, Jonah, Nathan, Myla, Dez and Chloe.  I hope when you kids are all grown up, you remember what a wonderful experience this was and how lucky you were to have been able to take part in such an experience.  I know that I will always remember the day that Ms. Burland and I got our own personal tour of the Jets locker room and I got my picture taken by Bogosian's equipment! He's my favourite!




   


In Harmony With Harmony

As part of The Integrated Arts program, we have welcomed local singer/song writer, Harmony Parent into our classroom.   I met Harmony back in April with a few other teachers from our school.  She impressed us with her musical talent and wanted to give us a real taste of what she could do with our students in the classroom.  By the end of the 2 hour session, Ms. Burland, Mrs. Waters, Mr. B. and myself had collaborated with Harmony to write a song about mummification ( I wonder who chose that topic! LOL!) Harmony decided that the lyrics would fit the tune of Alice Cooper's song "Poison".  It was actually really easy for us to write the lyrics.  Ms. Burland and I were the experts on Ancient Egypt so we were enthusiastically shouting out all the facts and of course, Mr. B is a natural when it comes to writing songs.  Anyway, we had a blast and I had our song "Journey to the Underworld" stuck in my head for weeks!  I used my laptop and the Garage Band app to record Harmony singing the song and playing her guitar so that I could play it for the students when I returned to school.  The students loved it too!  Since then, Harmony created an awesome video to accompany the song and she renamed it "Die Like an Egyptian".  I've included the YouTube link below for you to check it out.

When Harmony got the chance to finally meet MY fabulous group of talented students, they blew her away by singing their very own Egg Drop song.  She was SO impressed and I was SO proud of them! On our first session with Harmony, we decided that we will be writing a song about plants, to fit in with the Grade 3 Science curriculum. After much debate, we finally agreed that the "tune" of the song would be set to Taylor Swift's, "Trouble".  Stay "tuned" for our the release of Room 20's second big hit this year!!!!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cEGoJIwsdys

Friday 31 May 2013

Egg Drop Video



We are officially FAMOUS!!!!!!  OK, well maybe not famous, but we are certainly talented!  Not only did we write all the lyrics to our Egg Drop song (with the help of the amazing Miss Watson) but we also produced a video.  We had such a blast coming up with the rhymes and practicing our scenes.  Wearing sunglasses in class became the norm around room 20 during filming.  Being movie stars may have "gone to our heads a bit"but we LOVED it!  We made our debut at the May assembly and now the video has been posted on YouTube for all to enjoy.  Check it out!

Wednesday 15 May 2013

Spelling On The Mac.....Tarmac, that is.

Now that the weather is nice, we can take advantage of being able to learn in an outdoor environment.  We practiced our spelling words by writing them out on the tarmac in chalk.

Swim Like A Fish

How lucky are we to be able to go swimming in the middle of the school day??






Body Measures

So it appears that it has been a while since I have blogged.......that does NOT mean that we haven't been doing fun and exciting things in room 20!  I will play catch-up by adding several blog posts right now.
We had a few giggles while taking some "Body Measurements".  It was a fun way to learn about measuring with centimetres and metres, especially when we were measuring our belly buttons and smelly feet!



Monday 29 April 2013

Best Students EVER!!!!!!

Well I must say that I have the BEST STUDENTS EVER!!!!!  You guys are SO sweet!  Thank you so much for your "Get Well" cards.  They really made my day.  I really miss all of you guys too.  It feels really weird to be away from you and my classroom for so long but it's important that I listen to the doctor even though I'm feeling pretty well.  I can't wait to see all of you on Thursday!  We are going to start some new things like Shapes and Solids in Math, Mapping Skills in S.S. (sounds boring but we're going to make it fun) and Plants & Soils in Science.  I can't wait to grow some plants in the snow!!!!!  (kidding)
See you soon my little minions!!!!
Mrs. Shabaga

Tuesday 9 April 2013

Thrones Fit For A King

Using a LOT of toilet paper rolls and a whole LOT of tape, we built some stable thrones that are fit for kings!   Ok, so the thrones are only big enough to support miniature sized kings, weighing approximately 500g but there wasn't enough room in our classroom to store chairs any bigger than that!



We discovered that painting over red tape doesn't work very well.  Plan B involves spray-painting the thrones gold but the weather has been too cold for us to go outside and do that!  Needless to say, there has been a delay in our "manufacturing department".  In the mean time, we have decided to study the mummification process!

Wednesday 20 March 2013

Egyptian Death Masks

We have been learning all about Ancient Egypt in our class.  Recently, I taught the students about King Tut.  The learned about his life, death, burial, and the discovery of his tomb.  I did some "shared writing" with them for this blog post.  Here is what we wrote:

We made some really awesome Egyptian death masks!  First we covered some plastic masks with vaseline.  Then we covered them in cast plaster. We had to wet the cast plaster so that it would stick.  It was really messy!  Then we let them dry.  Next, we went outside to spray paint them gold.  It was hard to push the button on the spray paint can so Mrs. Shabaga and Mrs. M. had to take over the spray painting.  After that, Mrs. Shabaga gave us a nemes and beard to colour with metallic markers.  We used black permanent markers to draw the kohl eyeliner around the eyes of the gold mask and we drew on eyebrows.  Then we coloured a cobra and vulture to go on the top of the nemes. Hot glue was used to glue the nemes, beard, cobra & vulture to the mask.  Finally, Mrs. Shabaga put our masterpieces up on the bulletin board in the hallway for everyone to admire!