Congratulations to Alexis, who is honoured this month for being a very caring student! Alexis is always especially kind to our friends with special needs - picking them as her partner in games and work groups, choosing them next to take a turn, and being generally concerned for their feelings. On 'bend the rules' day, Alexis brought in extra money just in case someone wanted to have a privilege but didn't have the money to pay for it. Way to go, Alexis! You can see more pictures from our character counts assembly and spirit day celebration on the school's website, or visit my Twitter feed @mrscuckovic.
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We had such great participation in our red, pink and purple day! Thanks for all of the treats. The kids had so much fun giving and receiving their Valentines!
I hope everyone enjoys this nice long weekend - Valentine's and Family Day and a P.D. day all rolled into one glorious package! Here is our latest artwork on display in the hall. We did this over a couple of days. First, we 'pulled' paint over a piece of cardboard. This effect was achieved by first drizzling paint on the cardboard, then using another piece of cardboard to pull across the paint (similar to a pastry thingamajig - I'm not a baker!). The technique calls for some restraint. You just pull a couple of times, if you overdo it the effect is lost and you end up with one colour. Some of the kiddos had more success than others, but either way the end result was still pretty! We then worked on the background, which uses no colour. We talked about lines (straight, curvy, zigzag, dark, light, thin, thick, swirly, etc.) and also positive and negative space. The next step was cutting out the heart shape from the painted cardboard. This was not easy with the primary scissors! Most of them stuck it out but a few of them needed me to rescue them! The last step was the placement of the heart. Some of the kiddos took a lot of care with this decision, deciding on how best to use the directions of the lines to showcase the heart (or hearts). The end results are beautiful! This week we enjoyed a really fun activity with our buddies! Many years back I had dozens of decks of playing cards donated to my classroom and I've used them in many different ways. While looking around online, I found a wonderful resource which lists rules, complete with diagrams, for many card games which incorporate math concepts. If you'd like to find it, google "Acing Math one deck at a time". Aha! Perfect! I still had some decks of cards, so I printed up the instructions for several appropriate games (addition, subtraction, greater than/less than and place value). I didn't have quite enough decks to pair up all of the kids, but we had a couple of 'Make Ten' games going (similar to 'Go Fish' but you don't make pairs, you make combinations to 10) which had four players, and then the classics 'Trouble', 'Connect Four' and checkers. The kids had a wonderful time and, again, didn't realize they were doing math! We've been learning about objects, materials and structures. The past few days, we've discussed what makes a structure stable and how different materials are fastened together. Today we examined some of the toys in the classroom and found that the different materials are better suited for certain types of structures, and that each depended on something different for stability. Some materials are flexible, each toy had different types of fasteners, and some of the fasteners allowed parts of the structure to move. The kids had fun! |
About Mrs. C.Mrs. Cuckovic, or "Mrs. C." as she's called, is a retired educator who spent a long and varied career with the Greater Essex County District School Board in Windsor, Ontario. Archives
November 2020
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