Brrr its Cold!

This morning was so cold that it was a Blue Day at Dr. Coffin. A Blue Day is when we invite everyone to come inside before the bell rings because it is too cold to wait outside. When we have a Blue Day we are supposed to meet the supervisors at our regular door and they will let us inside. Once we are inside we can take off our outside clothes and come down the hallway to our classroom. If the classroom is open we can come in and look at books until the bell rings. If the classroom is closed we can sit and have a visit with our friends in the hallway. 

During our writing time today we started working on the watercolour paintings for our Whispering Woods books. Our learning intention is to make our writing even more powerful by adding illustrations that match our ideas and really help our audience imagine what it is like in the Whispering Woods. We will each be making 5 pictures to go with the 5 senses we wrote about. If we wrote more than one idea for each sense we are picking our favourite ideas to use for the pictures.

After our indoor recess (it was still too cold to go outside) we had word work. The grade 1's practiced words in the -ike family. This is part of our focus on word families that have a 'magic e' at the end. The grade 2's went with Ms. Stephure to finish the long and short vowel secret pictures they are making.  Then we had math. Today we started talking about counting by 2's. This is sometimes also called skip counting, or counting by multiples of 2. For the grade 2's there was an extra challenge. The grade 2's had to show the even number counting by 2's pattern and also the odd number counting by 2's pattern. On Thursday we will start making a speed game to help us get really good at counting by 2's.

This afternoon we started by watching a 10 minute video of two Inuit men building an Igloo. The video was quite old but it had a lot of really great information about the way an Igloo is built. Because the video was quite old, the narrator called the men Eskimos. We talked about how this was a name that people from the south used to call the Inuit but that it isn't really what the Inuit like to be called. The Inuit men in the video were amazing builders and built a whole igloo in less than two hours!  After we finished the video we worked to finish the shelter page in our Inuit history books.

** Thank you to our students who found out the answer to yesterday's challenge question. We found out that the Inuit made houses that they can move or rebuild because they are nomadic. That means that they move and don't just live in one place. The Inuit are nomadic because they need to hunt animals to survive. This means that if the animals move, they need to move. 

In gym we played floor hockey. We played 3-on-3 hockey just like yesterday. Lots of us are really starting to get the hang of it and the games went really well. Sidney Crosby better watch out!!

Very Serious Hockey Players!

Very Excited Hockey Players!

Our helper tomorrow is: Sarah