Merry Christmas!

Miss. OC is wishing all of you a very Merry Christmas and a healthy and happy New Year! Enjoy your holidays!

New students?

This week, we got some very tiny, very special new students!

These are salmon eggs. Can you see the black dot inside each egg? These eggs are 'eyed'! That means, they have been fertilized. Each of those black dots is the beginning of a tiny salmon. 

These salmon eggs aren't really sleeping at all. Inside each egg a salmon is busy developing! The salmon will grow inside their eggs for about a month longer and then they'll hatch.

Division 2 will be working hard to meet the needs of our new classmates. We know that fish need water to breathe, because they use their gills to get oxygen from the water. We learned that young salmon need very cold water to grow into strong adult salmon. Our class will be responsible for making sure our salmon have clean, cold water to swim in. Once the salmon hatch from their eggs, we will also have to make sure to feed them every day. We are looking forward to taking care of our salmon as they grow! 

Leave us a comment: 

What do you think about our newest students? 

Do you have an animal at home that you take care of? How do you meet all of its needs? 

Letters from Qatar!

This week we got some very special mail all the way from Qatar! Qatar is a very small country in the Middle East, in the Gulf of Persia.

Miss.OC's friend Valerie teaches at the HUBS International School in Doha Qatar, and her class of Grade 2 students sent us a package. They sent us postcards with letters all about themselves. They also sent us some cool photos of Qatar and drawings. We were very excited!

We want to send a BIG thank-you to our friends in Qatar! We recorded this video message for them; check it out:

 Thank-you for your letters, friends. Our letters are on the way to you!

Leave us a comment: 

What did you like the best about getting mail from Qatar? 

What do you think about our video? 

What questions do you have for our new friends in Qatar?

Crystals

Yesterday Division 2 did a Science experiment with liquids and solids. The liquid we used was water, and we looked at two different solids - salt and borax, a kind of laundry soap. We learned a new word - dissolve! When you mix a solid like salt into a liquid it dissolves in the liquid. It's not disappearing! The salt pieces just fit themselves in between the molecules of water.

Then we mixed borax with water, and it dissolved, too. To get the borax back out again, we had to find a way to get rid of the water. We tried getting rid of some of the water by putting it in cups and letting it dry up. When water dries up, it's really evaporating (that's another new word!). When water evaporates, it fills in the spaces between the molecules in the air. We know that when water goes into the air, it makes clouds, and clouds make rain! We put a pipe cleaner hanging in our glass of water and borax to catch some of the borax as the water evaporated.

After some of the water evaporated, it left the pieces of borax behind.  As the pieces of borax got back together again, they made some interesting shapes. We call these shapes crystals. We had a lot of fun examining our crystals up close with magnifying glasses.

Some students noticed that our crystals look a lot like snowflakes. Snowflakes are crystals, too, only snowflake crystals aren't made of salt or laundry soap, they're made of ice! Ice crystals can form in beautiful patterns, just like these paper snowflakes we made in art class today.

Leave us a comment:


What did you notice about the crystal you made? 


What other things can you think of that are made of crystals? 

And they're off ...

Miss. OC went to the local Post Office this afternoon to mail our letters to Santa.
I hope they'll get to the North Pole in time!

In our letters we told Santa who we are, where we live, and also whether we've been naughty or nice. We've all been very nice, of course! We also told Santa what we'd like to get for Christmas. Some of us had some very important questions for Santa, too! I'm excited to see what Santa will say when he writes back to us.

Leave us a comment: 


What are you wondering about Santa, his reindeer, or the North Pole? 


What are you looking forward to this Christmas? 

What a party!

During the month of November, our students, family, and friends posted a total of 138 comments on our Division 2 Class Blog! 


Yesterday our classroom was filled with parents, grandparents, uncles, aunties, and little brothers and sisters, all there to celebrate a very successful month of Family Blogging. We enjoyed a delicious meal of spaghetti and meatballs with bannock, prepared by our very own Division 2 class.

After sharing a meal with our families, we were excited to show them our classroom technology. We had a lot of fun using our Smart Board! We showed our parents how we can use the Smart Board to play our favourite Math Games. 

We were very patient during some tech-troubles (thank-you!), but we finally all got our laptops up and running. We showed our families how to post comments on our blog. Can you believe that our blog got over 20 comments in just a few hours yesterday?

We really liked sharing our favourite games to play on our laptops. Some of our parents even gave them a try! It was funny to see our parents playing Dance Mat Typing and Live Mathletics.

 

Thank-you to all of the families and friends that joined us in our classroom yesterday, and to everyone who helped us reach our comment goal this month! We hope that you will keep reading our blog and sharing your comments with us during the rest of the year. :)