Five for Friday

Before we get started I just had to include this pic of Jeff in his Montreal Canadians onesie.  

This was a gag birthday gift.  He was so happy to get it.  lol.

My class was lucky enough to have the chance to participate in a very cool event put on by our local legion hall. The event was around the theme of "Why do we Remember" in regards to our war veterans. It was amazing the response and engagement our my students had at this event. We were greeted by this 93 year old piper who served in the Battle of the Atlantic with the Canadian Forces. 

We also got to hear several more veterans speak of their experiences in World War II and it was capped off with a reading of the great and stoic poem of In Flanders Field. 

Our master of ceremonies even emphasized the passing of the torch from the poem to my students. It was simply marvellous.

After getting to partake in that event my students just wanted to study the war. So we took time out of of our language program to discover components of the war and the significance behind the sacrifices made by those very veterans that they met. We created a Remembrance Day package because of this and have used several of the activities this past week. One of the activities was that of Hand Poppies which we did with our Kindergarten buddies. My grade 4s painted the hands of their younger buddies and then our Kindergarten buddies painted our grade 4s hands. Together, each pairing created the symbolic poppy together. It was great for our grade 4s to teach the younger students about the significance of Remembrance Day.

One of the activities from our package is creating post cards for Veterans thanking them for their service time. This came from the idea of instead of writing one big class thank you note for our special field trip we had several individual notes thanking the Veterans for their time. 

The kids took great pride in colouring these in and then filling out the back of them. 

We have mailed them off so that Veterans should receive them either the day before Remembrance Day or the day after. 

It would be great to see the look on their faces when they get these heartfelt notes from students who view these men and women as true superheroes now. 

My students also recently finished their famous person biography box unit. It was amazing to see the creativity put into these boxes. As well as the through information included in the summary of these famous people. It will be a fun and interesting read while marking them. 

 

To cap a busy week we completed our first Readers Bistro of the year. It was a smashing success! The students loved their "lemon lattes" (OK it was lemon ice tea). They also loved when the Principal came to sit in on some of the book talks. We even found a few recommendations for our next class novel study.