Holidays Around the World

Amanda shared her findings on the celebration of Hanukkah in her presentation, created with the Keynote app.
Bravo Amanda! We all enjoyed it today and made connections with our unit about belief systems.

Holidays Around the World

Our Grade 4/5 EAL team was learning about various celebrations that take place around the world during this time of the year. In our EAL class we have students from Cambodia, Japan, Spain, Korea and Denmark, and that gives us a unique chance to share our customs and seasonal celebrations.  My students were using their iPads and the Keynote presentation app to familiarize their peers with numerous celebrations.

Ty Mean learned that if you eat 7 grapes and keep the seeds on New Year's Eve in Brazil, you will be rich.

Amanda is working on her Hanukkah presentation.

Making Timelines

My Grade 4/5  EAL students had an exciting learning experience during our current unit about leaders. Getting ready for writing autobiographies they created their own timelines and presented them to the group.
After reading books from "Getting to Know the World's Greatest Artists" series my students practiced creating the timelines of the famous artists and exchanged interesting facts with each other during the presentation.

Shukhy is sharing her timeline with her friends.

We learned many interesting facts about famous artists

We had lots of fun learning how to make timelines.

Grade 2/3 EAL Exchange

Everybody liked Arvid's story about sharks.

For the last 5 weeks my Grade 2/3 EAL students were learning to communicate through art and interpret various artworks. We started with reading pourquoi stories from different cultures and practised creating our own poems. All my students truly enjoyed the porquoi stories and enthusiastically unleashed their imagination. After several discussions, brainstorming, drafting and editing sessions, fantastic books with fun stories and colorful illustrations were created. All my students proudly shared their stories with Miss Carolyn's EAL class as well as with their mainstream classmates.

Serey's story was about how the zebra got its stripes.

After Jayco shared her story, Miss Carolyn's students decided to create stories as well!

Our Grade 2/3 EAL team had a very exciting beginning of the new unit. During the next several weeks we will talk about how personal perspectives influence people when they communicate through the arts.

Last week we learned about how to write Pourquoir Stories. We created a shared story and my EAL students had to add their own endings. After that they chose the best story and acted it out, enjoying a puppet show. The best story was Jingyu's and we all celebrated his success. Serey's story was chosen by the other group and we were impressed with his vivid imagination.

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Jayco and Arvid were confident presenters.

My grade 2/3 partial support EAL students were real risk-takers and presented their posters and reports on manatees to Miss Marcelle's EAL class. It was a great collaboration session and my students enjoyed a warm reception.

Ichiru and Srey Pich did a great job!

Ichiru is sharing her riddles.

Our Grade 2/3 partial support EAL group visited Ms. Marcelle's class today. Ichiru, Arvid, Jayco and Srey Pich enjoyed sharing their wonderful riddles about animals with Ms. Marcelle's students. 
Jade, Zereach and Ryu prepared a surprise for us. They created puzzles about animals and we all had fun playing.

All of us in Ms.Marcelle's classroom.

Jade is trying to guess the right answer.

Zereach has just finished sharing his elephant puzzle with Ichiru, Arvid, Srey Pich and Jayco.

Wednesday was a special day for my Grade 4/5 partial support EAL groups. Ms. Carolyn's students came to our classroom to listen to my students presenting. My 4/5 EAL students worked in groups and pairs and tried to explain to their friends from Ms.Carolyn's group about the pros and cons of using renewable and nonrenewable sources of energy.

Our presentations were a learning experience for us and we were very grateful to Ms.Carolyn and her students for being very supportive and giving us useful feedback.

Uha, Shukhy and Iben are presenting.

We are setting the goals for our session.

Emely and Carlota presenting

Congratulations to Arvid, Kelly and Sak!! They completed 25 nights of home reading assignments and received their certificates.

Guys, you are reading rockets!

Our Grade 2/3 EAL team had lots of fun on Friday creating habitats!

You can try to create your own habitat at
http://mrnussbaum.com/habitats/

We all are learning and helping each other on the way. 

Srey Pich enjoyed adding animals and plants to her habitat.

Sophia and Sak pair shared while working on their habitats.

Today is Jayco's Day!! Bravo Jayco and congratulations on your 25 NIGHTS CERTIFICATE!

As our educational journey continues, my Grade 4/5 students are learning about energy.
During the first week of the unit we discussed our Central Idea a lot to make sure we all understand what we are talking about. Grade 4/5 EAL students demonstrated their understanding by creating concept maps. Here is what Donghan wrote in his:

In order to support and accelerate our students' learning we introduced the Home Reading Programme.

Every day my students choose a book to take home and read with their parents. They usually have to think about the book and discuss it with their Mom and Dad. Reading is lots of fun as it is, but when we read together with our loved ones the experience is so much richer.

Ichiru is working really hard on her reading skills and enjoys lots of reading at home.

Belief Systems 4/5

During the Belief Systems unit of inquiry my Grade 4/5 EAL students had a chance to learn about their own (as well as various other) cultures and religions.

We had informative discussions, sharing our beliefs with others. Our findings helped us better understand people around us and we discovered the hidden meaning behind some traditions, customs and symbols. We showed a great deal of interest in each other, and all of our EAL group members became more knowledgeable and open-minded.

We enjoyed reading and discussing stories from many lands and made an important discovery: cultures are different, moral values are the same. 

Here are some of messages from Islamic, Buddhist and Jewish stories.

Healthy Habits Grade 2/3

During our Healthy Habits unit of inquiry my Grade 2/3 EAL students had lots of fun. We learned about healthy food, made a blackberry smoothy and wrote a recount about our learning experience.
Mmmm! Do it again at home with your Mom and Dad!