September 1st, 2015 First Day of School

Welcome to the very first blog post of the new school year!  Mrs. Zwack and Mrs. Bowles are so excited to be a part of your learning for the next 10 months.  It was great to see all of our students so eager to begin learning and inquirying!

Our day got started learning about some of the changes to the school.  We are all part of a village.  We discussed what is a village and how we can be part of a successful village. We read the book  First Day Jitters by Julie Danneberg.  This is always a favourite book to read as teachers as it shows that not only are students nervous and excited about the first day of school but so are the teachers!



We played a BINGO game to get to know all of our new friends in our classroom.  It was interesting to learn who could speak another language, who had a birthday in February and who had a broken arm or leg.    The morning was long and we needed a movement break - we went outside and played some tag games to get our heart rates up and helped us to shake some of our summer cobwebs out of our system.  Mrs. Bowles is a true believer in the research that states that exercise helps make our brains ready to learn!


We know that Mrs. Zwack will be with us in the morning and Mrs. Bowles will be with us in the afternoon.  It is kind of fun having two teachers who are fresh and can't wait to teach us something new each day.

In the afternoon we had math.  We looked at the numbers that have meaning in our lives:  our house number, our birthday, our phone numbers, our height, circumference of our heads and many more. Not only did we have to write the number as a numeral we had to write it in as many ways as we could. This was both challenging and fun!  How can you write your phone number in more than one way?  Can you challenge your families with this question?

At our afternoon nutrition break we read Wumbers  wri10 by Amy Krouse Rosenthal and illustr8ed by Tom Lichtenheld

 It was GR8!


We also started our science inquiry today. Those students who know Mrs. Bowles well know that these small inquiries can grow into monster inquiries.  Our inquiry question is "Is there a dinosaur in your gas tank?"  Students will be looking at this and learning about rocks and minerals, waste in our world and other social issues concerning this topic.  We hope to be working with Mr. Southworth setting up our own science inquiry blogs and sharing our learning with the world!


We finished our day with an assembly.  Mrs. Kinsman welcomed everyone back and Mr. Southworth and many grade three/four students shared our peace book  If Kids Ran the World by Leo and Diane Dillons.


As you can see it was a very full day and that Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Zwack love to read!