First week in the bag

No matter that it was a four day week for us, it was incredibly busy and a very good first week back to begin the new calendar year. There were lots of stories to be told by students, teachers and parents of activities concluded over the break and I think most of us were happy to be back in our little Cedar Grove community once again.

Today I started what will be a weekly time slot with Mrs. Sammartino and Ms. Perry's kindergarten students and today I introduced them to a program on the laptops called KidPix, though not the 3D version in this link.

The goals for this lesson were to learn to use the key pad to navigate and select objects and to "drag and drop" their choices. The children were going to find the animated letters of their first names and to place their names into a circus background. As they worked not all students could "get it" at the same time so I encouraged them to ask their classmates and experiment a bit before asking for some adult help. We will follow up over the next few weeks with other activities on the laptops as we become more confident about navigation and looking at icon (as opposed to word) based choices.

For Friday art, please enjoy an almost completed, Ms. Kennedy hoped for completion today, art project by the Grade 5 and 6 students in her class. You can see 25 squares which a student or two worked independently on and then the final project was assembled. There are a few bits and pieces of editing that need to be done, but this looks awfully nicely done to me so I wanted to share it this week.

Have a great weekend...