Room 122 Library Grand Opening - Sneak Peak!

Here is a sneak peak of the Grand Opening from today! I will post a detailed account soon :)

The red ribbon waiting to be cut!

More on Leaves

We have been doing a lot of learning about leaves. We have learned the different parts of a leaf and different types of leaves. We started an art activity a few weeks ago and the students have been working hard on their creations.

We traced leaves on overhead paper (see post named 'Leaves, Leaves and more Leaves!' for more details and pictures). The students then projected their drawings onto paper on the wall and again traced their leaf.

Then the students took their paper and painted their leaves. 

Here are some of the finished creations.

We decided to celebrate some of the learning we have done around leaves and display the students creations. Here is what it looks like in the classroom:

Leaf Man

Ms. Tompkins read a story called ‘Leaf Man’ by Lois Ehlert. The book describes the story of a leaf man traveling and meeting a number of different animals all made out of leaves. Students were excited to find the different animals in the pictures.

On our table, we had a provocation set up for the students to create their own leaf men. Students were very creative and made a number of different people and animals. 

 Students worked hard, using the book to inspire their creativity.

Here are some of the students' creations:

- A boat

- A fish

- A snowman

- 6 fish- Self portraits 

- People 

- A mouse

The students then added some writing to describe their leaf people/animals and we put them up to celebrate their great work!

Blog How To

I am so grateful for all the positive feedback I have received about the blog! 

I have also had a few questions about navigating the blog. If you are new to the blog world, it is quite simple! Here are a couple tips that will hopefully make it easier for you to interact with our blog.

To post a comment: we would love to hear your thoughts and wonders about our learning through a comment. To write a comment, you scroll to the bottom of the post where it says "no comment" or "1 comment". Click this and it will open up the post with a box to write your comment.

Finding a specific post: if there is a specific post you're looking for, the blog archive is on the right hand side. You can look by month to find the post you want, then click and it will take you there.

Get 'home': to get back to the main page of the blog, either click the title 'Thinking and Learning in Room 122' or scroll to the bottom and click 'home'.

I hope this makes it easier to navigate our blog. Looking forward to hearing your thoughts, wonders and comments about the learning the students are doing.

Learning more about Leaves

Ms. Tompkins- Why do leaves change colour?

A.B- I think because they fall down and they change colour

- it’s almost fall

K.B- the leaves that temi found had some red and orange on them too

E.M- because they have a little yellow on it and a little bit of brown and a little bit red on it because when fall stays down it changes black

A.K- the leaves on the floor

D.K- I thought if the leaves never fall that fall will never actually exist

T.K- because its almost winter

P.D- i wonder if they change colours because its almost winter and if the winter will go on top of the leaves 

- how about the leaves is falling down on the ground because the leaves are going to be mud and dirt

A.L- I wonder if its almost fall 

Z.H- it’s almost fall

D.S- the sun is up there

N.M- shared idea in Russian

- because it’s almost fall

We put a pile of leaves on the carpet that the students and teachers had collected. We wanted to know what leaves there were and how many. 

D.K- we can count them

D.S- count to 20 leaves

D.D- maybe we could...maple leaves, beech leaves, and a red maple leaves

A.B- a yellow leaf, and you could count all the maple leaves

N.M- count the leaves

- we could count birch leaves

K.B- there are 28 leaves, I counted them

- we can use our finger

A.M- we can count how many leaves in your garden 

- we count them 

A.B- put them to the side 

We counted them all together, as A.B put them to the side of our mat. We counted to 29. We had 29 leaves!

Ms. Tompkins asked, “what kind of leaves do we have? How can we find out what kind they are?”

- you can look at the tree and see if it’s the same, and see if it is a red tree, a yellow tree or brown tree

We asked the students to find the maple leaves. 

D.K pulled the maple leaves out and counted them. 

Then another student counted the brown leaves.  

Z.H counted the other leaves that were left over.

Then we moved the leaves to clipboards so we could label them. Students then wrote the names of the leaves.

We asked the students the names of the other leaves and we learned they were beech and oak leaves. So we labelled each type of leaf and then counted and wrote the number we had of each.

We counted each type of leaf that we had sorted. Then we compared the number of leaves we had. 

Z.H- maple leaf has most

D.D- 6 oak leaves because it has the number 6 on it 

- Beech in the middle (he re-counted to 8)

Ms. Tompkins put out a ten-frame counting mat. We recognized that there were the numbers from 1 - 10 on it. Students began to add leaves to match the number in each square.