Health and Hockey

During the last three Health periods, we have learned about how to stay safe when home alone. We worked in partners to read scenarios on green posters about kids staying home alone. Then, we wrote what we think the kids should do to stay safe in each scenario. We shared our thoughts in a class discussion. Miss Cichosz gave us posters and we talked about home alone safety tips. During the third lesson we acted out skits of how to stay safe in different scenarios when home alone. We learned a lot about safety! Check out the photos below.

Hockey is also underway and there are photos at the end of this post. We're having a lot of fun playing!

Cinnamon Ornaments

Now that the winter holidays have passed we can post about the cinnamon ornaments we made without spoiling any surprises. Miss Cichosz made the ornaments at home. This took a few days, so if you're interested in making them at home read the recipe at the bottom and make them early.

We painted the ornaments and threaded ribbon through the holes the next day, after the ornaments dried. We wrapped the ornaments and gave them as holiday gifts! They smelled delicious!

If you'd like to make cinnamon ornaments at home, copy and paste the following link:

http://allrecipes.com/recipe/18493/scented-applesauce-cinnamon-ornaments/

Here are some helpful tips from Miss Cichosz:

- Wear a rubber glove if you are mixing the ornament dough by hand. The mixture is very rough on the skin and can cause redness and burning. My poor skin found out the hard way!

- Mix the amount you need. You can make more or less, just start with half cinnamon and half applesauce. You will probably need to add more cinnamon to make the mixture thicken like cookie dough.

- Use cinnamon (instead of flour) to help stop your dough and rolling pin from sticking.

- Make sure you have plenty of space to place the ornaments to dry for a few days. If you don't have the space, you can dry the ornaments in the oven at 200ºC for about two hours. Make sure to check on them.

- Be prepared for your home to smell like cinnamon for a few days. The kitchen where you made the ornaments might have an overpowering cinnamon smell for a bit.

Happy ornament making!

Math and Light

Happy new year! Here are our highlights from our first week back at school:

We worked on writing both balanced and unbalanced equations in Math. We reviewed the difference between an equal sign and a not equal sign, then we worked in small groups to write a variety of equations and shared our work with the class. We practiced more on our own in our Guided Math duo tangs, which included finding missing numbers (called unknowns or variables) in equations.

Check out the link (or paste it in your browser) to see how we used puppets to make a puppet show for our Light Unit in Science with Mrs. Rogala! We read fairy tales and some of our own stories with a twist, and showed them using our puppets.

https://goo.gl/E2FT3Y

Here's some background information, by Nathan and Sara:

Hi, Nathan and Sara here to tell you about shadow puppets and how to make them. First, get a black piece of paper, a pencil, a straw, and some scissors. Now, take your pencil and paper and draw your design. Then, cut out your design with your scissors. Then, get masking tape and the straw and tape it to your shadow puppet. There you have it. There's your shadow puppet! It works because the paper is opaque.