Sonobe cubes

Math and art go beautifully together!  These are

modular origami cubes.  Each face of the cube is

folded in the same manner and then all the faces 

are fitted together to form the cube.  While folding,

the students noticed the 2D shapes that were

appearing in the paper:  rectangles, triangles,

parallelograms and squares.

Building numbers

During math time, we make numbers in many ways.  One way is with our "Power of Ten" cards. These cards are designed so that children can create visual images of numbers in their minds.  As you can see, there are 6 tens and then 5 units or ones in a visual shape that the students can subitize (see at a glance without really counting).  Subitizing is a building block of math just like phonemic awareness (being able to hear and manipulate the sounds in words) is a building block of learning to read.  At the Annex, we all know that we are teaching math differently than we learned it.  You are always welcome to come in and ask questions about what we are doing differently in math.

Schools say Thank-you! – Ted Harrison

My friend Barry was very close to Ted Harrison.  A while back, he called me to see if all of the students at the Annex would be interested in a new colouring and story book that the Ted Harrison Foundation had designed.  I immediately said, "Yes!" and Barry packaged up a box of lovely books-one for every one of our students.  My students know it's important to say thank you to people when they are given things so they all wrote thank-you letters to Barry, which many of them illustrated in the style of the book.  Barry was thrilled to receive them and sent some along to the Ted Harrison Foundation.  Take a look at the link!

Subject: Schools say Thank-you! – Ted Harrison

http://tedharrison.com/blogs/news/89303107-schools-say-thank-you

Happy cookie factory employee

This is one of the best days of the year!  Cookie Factory in December!  Busy "elves" along with all the other students in the school get to make cookies that we package up and sell as a small fundraiser.  Each class comes in and makes their cookies. This event is absolutely LOVED by the students and teachers alike.  Without our fantastic parent group, it would not be the joyous event that it is as the parents not only bring in the dough, get the tables set up, they also bake all the cookies and do all the washing up and keep the "factory" running smoothly. 

Paint My School Contest

Recently a parent in the school community

sent me some information about a contest that CBC's

North by Northwest was hosting.  The contest was
for students to draw a picture of what they liked
about their school and to briefly explain why they
chose to create their image.  The prize was a book
written by Katherine Gibson and Margriet Ruurs,
about Canadian painter Ted Harrison, called
"A Brush Full of Colour:  The World of Ted
Harrison".  We were one of ten schools around the
province that won!  Ty Sivak's picture of the apple
was picked as a winner!  Congratulations Ty!
And thank you to Carole Duffy who gave us the
idea to enter the contest-she knew we had
studied Ted Harrison's art last year and she also
knows we like to enter contests!  We are looking
forward to the book arriving for our school
library.

Enjoy!

A friend of mine sent me this short video.  It is a good reminder for all of us about how different we all are and how we all learn differently.  Enjoy!

https://www.facebook.com/Upworthy/videos/1125589420815248/

Halloween mural

Halloween stations are always so

fun!  I adopted Kim's mural idea from

last year.  This is the haunted house

designed by all the students of The

Annex.