Monday, November 12, 2012

Co-op update - Monday November 12, 2012

We had a full house today! Great turn out. It was so nice to have most here. It was a bit of a hodge podge day today and the weather certainly didn't help.

We had to complete our mixed-media art project from last week, so I divided the kids into two groups so I could work with one group at a time. While I worked with one group on their art, the others read, played cards, and played with some building toys. We then switched groups. Unfortunately the two kids who missed last week weren't able to participate in this activity. It was too lengthy to get caught up on.





The art took a good portion of the morning, so once both groups were done, they got outside for some free time while I cleaned up. We did this just in time to avoid the rain and had a quick snack afterwards!



Our virtue of the day was compassion. Most couldn't explain what compassion was, so after reading the description in the book, the kids were then able to come up with many examples of situations where they would demonstrate compassion. We also talked about situations which aren't quite as obvious, eg/ elderly person, pet, friend who might have wronged you, strangers, etc...

After thoroughly exploring the virtue of compassion, the kids were quite anxious to show off their buckets! Thank you to everyone for helping with this little project. We talked about how the week went with the filling of buckets. Did they fill their own, or did they also fill others? We talked about some of the challenges. One suggested that although they were doing a lot to fill their OWN bucket, sometimes, other family members did things that took away from their bucket filling! This was the perfect segue to the second rule of bucket filling!

The second rule is NO BUCKET DIPPING! This means that people can do things that affect our ability to keep our buckets full, for example;
a) being mean
b) tone of voice
c) accidents (eg/ a toy breaking)
d) insincerity
d) thoughtlessness
e) neglect
f) bullying
g) exclusion
h) name calling/put downs

For this week the kids are going to add to their buckets; however, bucket dipping will occur. If someone does something that affects the fullness of another's bucket, they are to remove one of the papers from the bucket! They can bring them back next week and we'll see how many they have left and we'll talk about some of the events that caused bucket dipping!

Lunchtime was really fast today. Actually the whole day flew by! After lunch we continued with the second part of our art project. I gave them a quick lesson on a colour wheel; primary and secondary colours, tints, shades, and contrasting colours.

While one group worked on outlining their bicycle with a contrasting colour, the other group worked on creating fraction towers with lego blocks. They made drawings in their workbooks and labelled their drawings with the required fractions. Once they had this down, they then worked on adding fraction towers. A few attempted subjecting fractions. Most were able to grasp this with ease.





Our finished art. I think they turned out quite well!







We started a new book today, BFG, by Roald Dahl. If you could acquire a copy for next week I would appreciate it!

We finished off the day with more place value math using UNO cards. They were given a certain number of cards and using the cards they had to come up with the highest 3 digit, 4 digit, and 5 digit number with the cards they were given. Once they had each number, they then had to do mental math to total the digits. A few struggled with saying the finished number out loud and adding the numbers together. This is a great game to speed up their math skills! Example;

Cards given to one player:    3      4      1      9      6      0      5       7       2

3 digit number found:      976 (they had to say this orally)

Total number of points:  9 + 7 + 6 = 22




Thanks everyone for another great day! Please remember to send a reading book each week. If they don't want to bring a book they can bring other quiet work to work on.

No comments: