Createch-ing

We are working this year around our inquiry question "How do stories connect the past with the present?" , our focus is to have a strong literacy base that allows us to connect all the core subjects and enhance reading comprehension. At the beginning of the year, we started reading the book "The Witches" , by Roald Dahl. I enjoyed reading this book aloud everyday, it allowed my drama side to happen in the class. We had lots of fun and now I have a group of students that have turned into Roald Dahl fans and are researching, reading and making power points about him ( still, three months after) . The plan was to connect art and Spanish with this story , and based on the chapter where the children disappear, we designed "Missing" signs that were displayed around the school hall. We worked the self-portrait technique following "that artist woman " blog guidelines. 1st.- We used a recycled paper as background , with white paint and a roll ...

This week we have been practicing robotics in Room 10.  We first brainstormed what do we use robots for in everyday life. We discovered that robots are often used for dangerous or difficult tasks for humans.  We then  decided our project : we will make a map of Alberta's  Natural Regions and we will make our robot tour around some landmarks in our province.  We did a couple of challenges to practice and refresh our memory before our expert, Richard Gaskell , came to our class. We also learned decimals in class because we are going to need them to program our robots. Estimation has also been a handy strategy to figure out the # of rotations needed. Today we were doing an advanced challenge. The students drew some letters with tape on the floor and the robots had to trace them. It was not easy, that is for sure, it involved decimals, angles moving backwards... but there was lots of determination and engagement and the results started to appear jus...

Bienvenidos a todos los profesores españoles que acaban de llegar a Alberta. Espero que tengáis una buena experiencia! Jornada de Bienvenida para los 48 profesores visitantes de Alberta, Canadá pic.twitter.com/r5N8juTd8d — Melissa Valdes (@melissavaldesv) September 29, 2014

My class  has been designing a Minecraft town garbage detector robot. The presentation will be on May 5th. I will be showing pictures of their creations.

We have finished our unit about India this week with an iPad activity.  After studying about India and its quality of life and guided by Srta.Palma, students created this beautiful hand art. It turned out much nicer than I thought initially, given the difficulty of the art.  I like to use iPads at the end of a learning unit as a recap or reflection of what they have been learning. In this case, we put everything together using the app "Popplet" that functions like a mind map. It is very easy to use, students just tap the screen twice to add a "popplet" ( box) and then write, draw or add a picture inside.  I introduced the terms "fact" and "opinion" to summarize the information they learnt about India and add their thoughts too. They wrote five or six sentences that had different facts and their opinions about India . Then they put it all together in a Popplet.  As a visual learner, I love this mind maps to summarize a learning un...

This is the link to the news on Calgary Herald...check it out! Spanish program struggles with demand

We have been doing multiplication for the last few weeks. One of the art projects was related to one of the multiplication strategies: using an array. Students had to design an "Array City" ( Ciudad de matrices in Spanish) designing buildings that had different number of rows of windows. They had to be able to express that with a multiplication equation . They first did a draft on their journals. Then they transferred that to an acetate page using a sharpie. The "windows" have to be big enough to be able to color in with a pastel crayon. Then they colored it using pastels . We finally glued it to a black piece of cardboard. After the art was done, I wanted them to work on the language component of it. We used the iPad app  'thinglink "  to label the pictures with the descriptions , both written and orally in Spanish. They posted them on their kidblog page. This is one example: I really like how thinglink provides a whole different level of c...