Pumpkins, Pumpkins Everywhere!!

Wow, what an exciting day we had yesterday!  A group of Grade 10 Planning students came from our local high school to carve pumpkins with us.  They arrived with pumpkins in hand and lots of friendly smiles!

We got down to work opening our pumpkins up and digging in to remove the seeds and pulp from the inside.  Some of us were a little nervous at first, but eventually the grade 10's showed us how it was done and we worked together to empty those pumpkins!!

We are digging in now!!

 




We got to design the faces, and then our high school friends helped us to carve out our designs.  They look amazing - don't you think??





Carving out the face with my grade 10 buddy!!








It was so great to work with students from the local high school - some of them were even former students from our school!  We hope they come back to work with us again sometime soon!








Thanks to the Grade 10 students for bringing us pumpkins and letting us take home our wonderful jack o lanterns!!

 I think she likes my jack o lantern!

What kind of face will you give your jack o lantern this year?

Fall is Here!!

This week we created some Fall themed art.  First we examined the trunk and branches of deciduous trees (ones that loose their leaves). We used torn paper to make our silhouette (kind of like a shadow outline) of the tree.  Then we used fall colors to sponge paint the leaves on the tree, falling off the tree and landing on the ground.  Fall is a wonderful time of year and we did an amazing job creating our Fall pictures!  Take a look next time you stop by our classroom.  Here's a picture of our artwork.

Using Our Creative Brain!

Wow, have you created something new recently?? Today we had a half hour of using our imagination and creating.  The assignment was to use different kinds of objects and then imagine, build and explain what you have created.  Did we ever have fun!  We have great imaginations - can you tell what we made? 

Tree of Gratitude..........

Last week, some of our parents built us a big and beautiful tree for our front entryway. The whole school is working on showing how grateful we are for the many things in our lives by sharing our ideas on leaves and adding them to the display.

Our class worked on our 'tree of gratitude' leaves yesterday. First we watched a video of the song, 'It's a Wonderful Life' to get ideas about how wonderful our life is and why.  Then we brainstormed our thoughts, keeping in mind that we wanted to think about things that were similar to what we saw in the video.  We came up with many wonderful ideas like: love, friendship, family, the trees that give us air and shade, rain so that we can drink, food that gives us nutrition, special events in our lives, etc.

Stop by our foyer and have a look at what we are grateful for!   What are you grateful for?

     Our Tree of Gratitude

Division 9 and 10 Leaves

Creative Veggie Platter for Fruity Friday

Thanks to our amazing parents, each week the students in our class enjoy platters of fresh fruit and veggies.  This gives us all an opportunity to enjoy fruit and veggies we already love, and also to try new ones that we may not always choose.  It is always fun to discover that we actually like a fruit or vegetable that we previously thought we didn't!

Last week, we had the most creative display of fresh vegetables made by our very own Leif!
He represented Clash of Clans by making an archer tower, a town hall, wizard towers, hidden tesla, air defence and army camps, all from vegetables!! It took him about 45 minutes to create.  We were so impressed!  It was hard to eat because we didn't want to ruin the presentation, but we did munch on everything eventually!  Thanks Leif for sharing your imagination with us!

   Can you find the towers and the town hall?

Husky Drawings

We have just finished our directed drawings of Husky Dogs and they look amazing! 

First we practiced on blackboards.  We learned how to estimate the size of the husky head and where it should be placed on the paper.  Then we added each of the parts like the snout, the ears, eye, mouth, tongue and neck.  After that we were able to use the proper colors for huskies (white, gray, black and ice blue for the eyes) and we tried a technique that helps make our huskies look like they have real fur. Last, we created clouds with white wax crayon and added a blue wash for the sky. 

We are very proud of the way they turned out!   What do you think of our Husky Dogs?

African Drumming and Dancing at Our School

This week we were very lucky to have had an amazing performance from a group of African musicians and dancers who visited our school.  They taught us about some African instruments and the different countries they came from. They also performed songs and dances from Africa.  It was fantastic! One of the dancers could do flips forwards and backwards! The other performers were amazing drummers and dancers too!

Some of the instruments are made from gourds (a relative of the pumpkin!).  They hollow them out and then dry them in the sun first.                          

Can you find the gourds in this picture?