Improbabilities............

I took these photos on our October trip to Vancouver and Vancouver Island. I was struck by the the fact that life continues to exist in these seemingly improbable/impossible locations. What cheery little sprigs of colour amongst the grey!

What a great, busy day!

Look at our "Caterpillars"!
Luckily, these ones are edible!

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm!

Swimming is so much fun!

Sploooooosh!

We are having so much fun with school swimming. We have students at all stages of swimming, from those who haven't had lessons yet to others who have had lessons and are more experienced swimmers. We've had lots of fun doing star floats, bobs, kicking, and having free time in the deep end and the hot tub. What a super opportunity for the students. Many many thanks to all the parent volunteers who have donated their time to come and supervise!

Planting our Front Flower Garden and More

On Monday afternoon, our class went out to the front garden to plant the beautiful flowers generously donated to us by Poitras Greenhouse. We have a beautiful, colourful selection of red, pink, purple and pale yellow petunias, as well as some bright gold marigolds. Look at the before and after pictures below - the students worked so hard to create such a stunning garden!

Mrs. Wielgosh demonstrating how to plant the flowers.

Our finished garden - WOW!!

On Friday, June 8, 4 wonderful volunteers - Mrs. Kowalchuk, Mrs. Omichinski, Mrs. Leochko, and Mrs.Wielgosh came in to help us sew our own sandwich bags to further reinforce the learning we did in May about the 3Rs - reducing our waste, reusing containers and sandwich bags, and recycling paper, metal, and plastic, and composting. We are all doing a better job of practicing the 3Rs, and LOVE our new sandwich bags - don't you think they are great?

Goodbye to our little feathered friends :(

Yesterday we said goodbye to our sweet little chicks and ducks. Our chicks hatched 3 weeks ago and our ducklings 2 weeks ago. We were able to watch a miracle of life in our classrooms. They have shared time between Rooms 188 and 192 and between Mrs. Wielgosh's and Mrs. Robinson's homes. They went to a very good home on a hobby farm. We had one last visit with them in the front garden of the school, where we got to watch and sketch them. We are going to miss them very much, but it's time they went to a bigger place where they have more room to roam.

Caramel and Cheetah, our chicks, and
Sunshine and Moonlight, our ducks.

Sketching the chicks and ducks one last time.

Swimming in the pool!

What a busy month!



Meet "Sunshine", just newly hatched,
 with her head inside her shell!

Sunshine, drying off and looking around.

Sunshine, out in the schoolyard.

Sunshine's mate "Moonlight".

We have had so much action this month with our lifecyles theme! Our butterflies emerged from their chrysalises and we released them, our ducks, "Sunshine" and "Moonlight" hatched, and we have been busy planting our vegetable garden out back and the flower garden out front. Thanks so much to Kathy Luczek at Poitras Greenhouses for her super generouse donation of all the flowers in our front garden! They are gorgeous!

Lifecycles abound!

      DID YOU KNOW OUR BUTTERFLIES HATCHED???!!!

When we came in after the long weekend, 5 of 7 butterflies had come out of their chrysalises. We are waitingfor one more, but it might not come. These are Painted Lady butterflies. We will release them soon.

This morning we went out to get some fresh pond water for our tadpoles. We went behind the school. It was awesome. We found snails and water beetles in the water. Then we came inside and added the new water to the old water. Kade estimates there are about 25 tadpoles in the water table. When we were doing some close observations and sketching today, we think we see some froglets forming!

Our two chicks hatched on the weekend! We have named the light one Fluffy and the darker one is Cuddles.

  



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Ryan P.s sketch of a Painted Lady butterfly



Life's Magic and Sadness

 Today is a day of sadness and happiness. Our little robin died overnight. I snuggled with it around midnight on Monday night and it was still alive, but, sadly, was not breathing when I checked in on it this morning. It was a very long shot that it would survive in captivity. It lived for about 2 1/2 days and was a real fighter.

This morning when I looked in the large incubator, I heard a peep and noticed that one of the chicken eggs had a hole in it. I watched while a little beak continued to poke at the hole. I'm sure when everyone comes to school tomorrow morning we will have some baby chicks! The ducks are not due to come for another week.

                     

Finally, look what else happened this weekend! I came to the classroom this morning to see that a butterfly had emerged from its chrysalis! By the end of the day, 5 out of 7 butterflies were out!

                                                      

What a miracle!!! Here I am, world!

Just out of its shell and squirming around.

Our baby robin was born this morning! It came out of its shell at about 10:15-10:30 this morning! It is so tiny and beautiful! It had its first worm at 10:45, another at 11:20, and some wet cat food at 11:50. It is resting in the bottom photo. Isn't it just amazing?MY whole family, including my parents who are out visiting from B.C., were able to see the baby robin shortly after it came out of its shell.

Still squirming and drying off.

Ready for its first feeding!

Having a rest after a feeding.

Look at us now!!!

Our caterpillars have all formed chrysalises and we have transferred them to the screened butterfly house. We have painted lady butterflies coming soon!






Mrs. Hadaller has been our guest teacher for 3 days this week! This is what we did with her:

Yesterday we were writing facts about tadpoles. We wrote 4 facts and drew pictures. - Kade

Mark, Ryan L., and I went on the internet to look at images of tadpoles and we drew pictures and wrote facts about them. I found out that when a tadpole grows into a frog it might eat another frog. - Ryan P.

We played "Pig" in Math and the boys won. Mrs. Hadaller gave us gummy worms! - Eve

We learned about the lifecycle of a butterfly and wrote about it. - Jeremy

 We learned about how many days in a year there are. There are 365 days in a year! - Kaden

We worked on our Human Rights boxes. - Ethan

We played "Pig" and after the boys won we each got a gummy worm! - Ryan L.

We read a book called "Tadpole Diary" and made our own tadpole diary. I learned that sometimes tadpoles eat other tadpoles. - Hailey

We did a butterfly fact sheet and we had to tell 4 facts. We had to print really neat and add lots of detail and so I did that. Monarch Butterflies eat a poisonous weed called milkweed. If a butterfly has bright colours it means that it is poisonous. - Bethany

Wow - I am really impressed with all the work the students got done while I was gone! I sure missed everyone! Have a super May long weekend everyone! :)

Katlyne brought her new puppy, a Labradoodle named Tootsie, in today. She is 12 weeks old, and very gentle and playful! We had a lot of laughs watching her trying to catch her tail and giving everyone kisses! Thank you for bringing her in!

We had fun practicing our new spelling words by printing them out on our friend's back. It was hard to figure out what some of the words were, but it was fun trying anyway! This week's words are a bit tougher for all 3 levels, so we'll have to study a bit more!

Hatching Day! The praying mantises are coming! The praying mantises are coming! Today 50+ babies hatched out of one of the egg cases. It was SO COOL seeing all of the tiny praying mantises! They are brown right now, and you can see their triangular shaped heads and big eyes. Their arms are folded so they really do look like they are praying! Did you know there are about 1800 different species of praying mantis, and that they are usually brown and green, but they can also be white and even pink in colour?!

Today was Music Monday, and we had an assembly first thing to hear and see all of the ways different classrooms in our school practice music. There was singing, dancing, movement, the recorders and Orff instruments, and even skipping to music. It was a lot of fun! Our class sang "The Puffin". We did awesome :)

This week is Chavi's last week at our school :(    .... she will be missed by everyone, especially Mrs. Robinson. We will enjoy the week together and try to create some more lasting memories for all of us.


Eggs Eggs Eggs!!

This afternoon, I went to pull off a robin's nest on top of a light at the back of the house that I watched a mama and her babies nesting in last year - that's them in the first picture. I haven't noticed any activity this year, so I thought it was empty. To my surprise, look what I found!! Unfortunately, not expecting any eggs, one flew out of the nest as I pulled it off and broke on the ground. Then I saw a dead swallow nearby. Do you wonder what happened? I sure did! Thinking about it, I wonder if  the swallow must have been trying to get at the eggs and the mama robin got into a fight with it. I think the robin abandoned the nest because I didn't see it anywhere. So, I brought the nest to school tonight and Mrs. Deneka and I decided to put them in her incubator with her chicken eggs to see what happens. Accidently, one egg broke as Mrs. Deneka picked it up....they are so light and fragile. What a cool find!

On Friday, Mark brought in 2 goose eggs he found near his house. We showed Mrs. Deneka's class, and we decided to put them in with the Silkie hens in her classroom to see if they will hatch. This hen looks like she is wondering where this large egg came from...."When did I lay THAT huge egg?" Can you believe the difference in size between the chicken egg and the goose egg?

                         

Friday was a great day! We went out to the front garden to clean out all the quack grass, weeds, and old plants in an effort to get it ready to plant again this month. We pulled some perennials out that are already starting to grow (Lamb's Ear, strawberries, yarrow) and we have them in the classroom for now. We had so many weeds!! Mrs. Wielgosh's class and Mrs. Kobelka's class went out in the morning to work on one part of the garden. We will definitely have to spend another block out there next week to pull out some more weeds. Then we'll get it rototilled to make it healthier for our new plants. We have already started our seedlings in the classroom with the help of Mrs. Geverink, who willingly got dirty in an effort to help our students plant their seeds. We planted seeds that we harvested from the flowers in the Fall! We'll keep you posted on what comes up!

Lifecycles in the classroom!

We are lucky enough to have been given some Painted Lady caterpillars via Mrs. Deneka and the Creature Comforts Cottage. We are excited to see the lifecycle from the caterpillar to butterfly stage! We learned that this is called "metamorphosis".

Yesterday, we incubated 5 duck eggs in Mrs. Wielgosh's classroom. We got them locally from Kay Bales, who has a whole bunch of ducks and eggs at her farm. Thank you, Mrs. Bales!

At the end of the day, Mrs. Robinson added 2 chicken eggs to the incubator that Mrs. Deneka kindly shared with us, also from the Creature Comforts Cottage.

AND...if you look VERY closely, you can see a baby praying mantis in this picture! Mrs. Wielgosh brought some praying mantis egg cases in last week. We are still waiting for those to hatch, but last night she saw Mrs. Reid over at Gillis School who gave her an egg casing that had hatched some praying mantises already. They are so tiny!

So, we have a lot of great observations, wonders, hatchings, and more going on in the 1/2 Multi-Age end of the school!

Final Day of 5 Days For Freedom

What a week! Our students have learned so much about others around the world who have much much less than they do. We looked at Freedom From Disease and Freedom to Act today. We learned that we have the power to help change the world. Of course, this was seen already by our class and Room 188 in our Pennies For Peace project. In addition, we each wore a band-aid with a health word written on it to symbolize and acknowledge all the health related issues in our less fortunate communities worldwide.

Because it is Earth Day on Sunday, April 22, we also went outside with Room 188 and cleaned our playground. We estimate we collected over 1000 pieces of garbage in about 20 minutes! Way to go!!

I think what we learned most of all this week is that, by lending a hand and taking action in both small or big ways, we can all help change the world!