We are Writers!

Mrs. van Rees read the book, "Library Mouse" by Daniel Kirk a few weeks ago. We loved it! It is about a mouse named Sam who lives in the children's section of a library. Sam loves to read. One day he decides to write a book. He knows that all good authors write about what they know, so he wrote a book about himself. When he was done, he added it to the collection of books in the library and the next day the children found it and read it. This happens a few times in the library and the children become so curious to find out who the author is, they ask Sam to show himself to them. Instead, Sam creates small "mouse-sized" books and "mouse-sized" pencils and allows the children to see themselves as writers and gets them writing. Mrs. van Rees made us "mouse-sized" books and "mouse-sized" pencils and we were able to start writing our stories. This has been such a fun way to write! We have been writing ghost stories, stories about our families, stories about our favourite sports and so many more!

Building Structures

We have been collecting various sizes of boxes and paper towel rolls for the past week and today we got to build structures! Mrs. van Rees first had us draw a "blue print" of our structure and then today we were trying to build our structure to match. We learned that some of us had to change our initial drawing, as it couldn't be made as easily. We had such a great time building today. Here are a few pictures of our structures as we were creating today.

Flat Stanley

We finished reading the book "Flat Stanley" by Jeff Brown. If you're not familiar with the story, the main character, Stanley gets flattened by a bulletin board that falls on top of him while he is sleeping. Luckily, he wasn't hurt - just flattened! Later in the story, Stanley visits some friends in California by mailing himself in an envelope. After a nice visit, his friends send Stanley back to his family with some pictures and descriptions of his trip. From this part of the story, we got the idea to create our very own Flat Stanley to send away for an adventure of his very own! Mrs. van Rees created a blog where others can tell us about Stanley's adventures and include pictures too. Our friends and family can also send in paper copies of their adventures instead - it's up to them.


We'd love for you to check out our Flat Stanley blog! You can read all about his adventures here.

Objects and Materials Inquiry

Last week we started a new inquiry on objects and materials. We started by getting time to explore different materials and objects Mrs. van Rees put around the room. We asked lots of questions and enjoyed playing with the objects. They all felt different and smelled different too. Some were hard, some were soft. Then we looked at a book about materials and most of the class was interested in metal or wood. Today we did some research about wood and metal. We wrote down some important facts about the materials and asked lots of questions too. We started thinking of lots of objects made from these 2 materials. I think we're going to make lists of all the things we know later this week. Keep posted to see all the learning we're doing with 'objects and materials'.

100th Day of School!

Today we are 100 days smarter - we celebrated the 100th day of Grade One! Some of us brought in 100 items to count and show to others. We know that if you put 10 items into 10 groups, you make 100. See our pictures below!

On Twitter, Mrs. van Rees found that that there were other classes that was celebrating 100's day too. A Grade 1 class from Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan were trying to get 100 tweets for 100's day by tweeting out their 100th day stories and items. We followed along using the hashtag #100storiesof100 and added our pictures and stories too.

We made lists of different things in our classroom. We made 10 different lists of 10 things - that way we had a list of 100 things altogether!

We also tried to find out how many times our names could be written in a hundreds chart. It was fun writing our name so many times, but it was tricky counting how many times we actually wrote it.

Did your class or will your class celebrate the 100th day of school? If so, we'd love to hear about it!

Dr. Pepper

This is Dr. Pepper. He is an elephant webkinz and he's our writing buddy. We voted on his name and Dr. Pepper got the most votes.

Dr. Pepper goes home with each of us. We get to have him at our house for a few days and write about our adventures. All our writing goes into a binder that we share with the class when we bring Dr. Pepper back to school.

We love having Dr. Pepper join us at home! Do you or did you ever have a writing buddy? We'd love to hear about your adventures!

Raz-Kids

We have started reading online using Raz-Kids. It's like a home reading program, but online with books that can be read to us! We can also read the book ourselves AND answer questions about the book. It's a pretty great website!

To log on at home, go to : http://raz-kids.com/login

Teacher username: jvanrees

Our passwords were sent home a few weeks ago.