The first fifteen days of school have been amazing.  It’s exciting to see some old friends and meet new ones.   We have 8 new grade ones, a new student in grade two and another new student in grade three.  Our classroom is not only multi-grade but also multilingual.

We began the year by deciding about what kind of classroom environment we want to learn in.  Our students created 204 Creative Words of Wisdom.  Our favourite line is the first one that says, “We are readers, writers, scientists, explorers, artists, mathematicians, and problem solvers”.

Each school day gets tracked on a Number Chart.  We determine the number of equal groups we can make for the number for that day.  Today we are on day 15 and have figured out that we can make three groups of five and five groups of three.

New desks for our classroom were ordered in late May.  They were made in Stonewall, Manitoba!  We are excited to finally be able to sit at our new desks.  Each desk has a plant which has been named by students.  We hope to take good care of these plants by remembering to water them unlike our plant from last year which our Daycare friends rescued for us.  Thanks to them the plant lived.

If you happen to walk by Room 16, you will see our portraits and our written reflections about them hanging on the bulletin board in the hallway. We worked hard to get the shape of our face, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, and blend skin and hair colour.

Students in Room 16 love to read and have been working to build reading stamina.  We started to track our reading stamina on September 8 at which time we read for 5 minutes.  Now we have worked our way up to 13 minutes of uninterrupted reading.    A book we especially enjoyed but was quite sad was called, Stolen Words, written by Melanie Florence.  It was a book about a young girl and her grandpa.  She was sad to learn he had lost his language because of the school he had been sent to.  His grand daughter found a book with Cree words so he could begin to learn those lost words again.

The reading power that we have been working on this month is making connections to our memories, facts and imagination.  We will use these same powers in our writing too.

We have learned that Terry Fox was a courageous Canadian.   His Marathon of Hope has raised 750 million dollars to date.  The students at Earl Grey ran on September 22, 2017 in his honour.  For the first this year we ran inside the soccer field.  Some students ran as many as 19 laps around the field.

We like to learn in the classroom, hallway, and outside.  While the weather is enjoyable we will try to take our learning outside as much as possible.

We hope the next 9 months will be just as exciting.

Written by the students and teacher in Room 16