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A teacher-friend of Mrs. Black's, who is the librarian at Victoria Harbour P.S., has a gravely ill student at her school. Eight year old Rebeccah's mother asked that people support her daughter by sending Christmas ornaments to decorate a tree in her bedroom.  When students in our class were told about Rebeccah's predicament, they jumped at the chance to support her.

This morning, we made ornaments using plastic bottle bottoms, glitter glue and shiny elastic.  Students put a great deal of care into their work and it shows... the results are truly lovely.  Click on any picture to enlarge it.

This is our class posing for Rebeccah with their creations:

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Mrs. Black had a cousin who lost a battle with leukemia at age 10, so she wanted to do something more.  She adopted Andy, the White-tailed Deer at Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary, for Rebeccah.  Andy isn't one of Santa's reindeer, but he's pretty darned close!

meet-andy

When she was at Aspen Valley for a meeting, Mrs. Black and the sanctuary manager, Mr. Smith, made Rebeccah a short video of Andy.  Click on this link to view the video in wmv-format:  http://www.blackdeer.ca/For-Rebecca-w.wmv

becky-video-screencap

Mrs. Black will be delivering the class' ornaments to Rebeccah at a community fund-raiser for her family, in Victoria Harbour, on Saturday, December 7th. The sanctuary will be sending Rebeccah a certificate of adoption and a picture of Andy in the mail.  We hope our small gifts to Rebeccah will put a smile on her face and help her to see how much others care.

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UPDATE:  Sunday, June 29, 2014

Becky, her family and the librarian from Victoria Harbour P.S. came to Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary today, so Mrs. Black could give them a private tour. One of the highlights for Becky was finally getting to meet Andy the deer!

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Thank you for visiting our class BLOG.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me (Margaret Black):  mblack@scdsb.on.ca or to add a comment to this page.

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Mrs. Black has offered to help a local wildlife rehabilitation center and sanctuary, by developing some school resources for them. The activities in the school resource packages would fulfill curriculum expectations and character education objectives, while engaging students in supporting the work of the centre through fund-raising, collection of goods, animal sponsorship, writing, media literacy, math and the arts.

Mrs. Black created a two-page resource, based on a "Help me stay wild" info-graphic about Black Bears produced by the rehabilitation centre. Click on the image or link below to see her sample resource:

teacher-resource-sample-screen-caphttp://www.blackdeer.ca/AVWS-TeacherResourceSample.pdf

Last week, Mrs. Black showed the class the sample resource. Students really liked the idea and asked if they could help with the development of resources for other species, as a media literacy project. They also asked if they could try out the narrative writing prompt in the sample resource about Black Bears.

The Grade 5 students completed the narrative writing task this week, while their Grade 6 counterparts were writing the EQAO test. Students thoroughly enjoyed learning about the habits and food preferences of Black Bears, and then writing a story about a visit to a dump, from a bear's perspective. In the process, they learned about what their families and neighbours might be doing to inadvertently attract bears to their neighbourhood.

Friday morning, we had a media literacy session in which students:

  • watched a video about the work of the rehabilitation centre:  http://environmentfilms.org/EF/ASPEN_VALLEY.html
  • reviewed the sample resource
  • listened to three of the "bear narratives" written by the Grade 5 students, and identified the lesson or moral in each story
  • discussed what other forms of writing can be used as a teaching tool
  • broke into small groups and rotated through six stations, brainstorming fund raising ideas and curriculum-based project ideas, for five other animal species for which the rehab. centre has produced "Help me stay wild" info-graphics

Here is how today's media literacy session looked:

NOTE:  We have sent the wildlife centre links to the sample resource and this blog post. We are now (May 31st) waiting to see if the centre would like us to further develop our ideas for their website.  July 31st:  Mrs. Black went to Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary for a meeting with the General Manager and the retired teacher who conducts school visits at the sanctuary.  They loved the work the class did and asked Mrs. Black to go ahead and develop four more project sheets, using the ideas the class provided.  🙂   September 14th:  The Board of Directors at Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary viewed and approved first drafts of five educational resources. Next step: They will go through final edits and field testing, and then be uploaded to the Aspen Valley website.

Thank you for visiting our class BLOG. If you have any questions or comments, feel free e-mail me (Margaret Black):  mblack@mail1.scdsb.on.ca or to add a comment to this page.

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On Friday, March 1st, Mrs. Thompson’s Grade 6/7 class and our Grade 5/6 class decorated ceramic bowls to help combat homelessness in Simcoe County.  These bowls will be used by participants in a fund-raising event to benefit Couchiching Jubilee House, in Orillia. Students received a visual arts mark for their work on this project.

Here are pictures of some of the students in our class painting their bowls. Click on any photo to enlarge it:

More information about Couchiching Jubilee House and the "Bowls for Beds" fund-raiser is provided in our Community Service Projects BLOG post.  Couchiching Jubilee House is the fifth project listed in that post.

Thank you for visiting our class BLOG.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free e-mail me (Margaret Black):  mblack@mail1.scdsb.on.ca or to add a comment to this page.

Today we had fun at our school Dance-a-thon fund raiser.  Here is a gallery of photos from the event.  Click on any photo to enlarge it.

Thank you for visiting our class BLOG.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me (Margaret Black):  mblack@mail1.scdsb.on.ca or to add a comment to this page.

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By Allisa and Megan

We dance in our classroom almost every day.

Sometimes we dance to take a break from sitting. We dance to songs on Mrs. Black's MP3 player. When we do this, students get to make up dances and lead the class.

Here we are (Megan and Allisa) with Ashley, leading the class during a dance break:

The boys love to lead our dance breaks too:

We have also been dancing during this month's Arts periods. We have been participating in a Wii game called Just Dance, using Mrs. Black's Wii and the classroom projector. When we play, we have to dance along to what's on the screen.

We take turns using the remote, which gives the person holding it a score on how well they did. Isaac holds the record for dancing to the song Kung Fu Fighting. His score was 7000 points.

Here are some pictures of us dancing with the Wii:

Dancing at school is really fun!

Thank you for visiting the class, via our BLOG.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me:  mblack@mail1.scdsb.on.ca or to add a comment to this page.

by Jenna D.


This is me, writing this BLOG post!

The first month of the year we were doing drama.  We have also done a little bit of dance.  This month we are doing Visual Art with wavy paint lines and character traits about ourselves.  This was a good starting art piece because everyone could be successful.  Everyone worked very hard on their art piece.  We had to be very careful that we didn't get our colours smudged together.  We had to use permanent marker to outline the letters and the wavy lines.

We made Success Criteria.  It looked like this:

Here are some of the kids working:

Here is a sample of some of the finished art:

This art project can be found on Jennifer Runde's BLOG, Runde's Room.

Thank you for visiting the class, via our BLOG.  If you have any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me:  mblack@mail1.scdsb.on.ca or to add a comment to this page.

Music and Physical Education classes have "moved outdoors" of late, along with Science and Math (see previous BLOG post).

In Music, students are working with homemade "unpitched rhythm instruments" to create percussion accompaniments to Aboriginal legends and student-authored stories.  In gym, we've been honing our baseball skills.  Below are some pictures of these outdoor learning experiences.  (Click on any photo to see it enlarged.  Click on the "back" button on your browser to return to this page).:

Thank you for visiting our class BLOG.   If you have any questions or comments, feel free to e-mail me:  mblack@mail1.scdsb.on.ca or to add a comment to this page.

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