Tomorrow is Toonie Tuesday! The hallways are lined with amazing posters to remind you to bring your toonies to school tomorrow.

The students have started delving into the depths of effective storytelling and how to captivate an audience when reading aloud. Students will be exploring different activities based on books by the renowned children’s author, Robert Munsch. There will be reading and listening activities, and assessments related to identifying the main idea and examples from the text to support their BIG IDEA claim. The students have been sampling several books by this author, and will very soon (by Monday of next week) have chosen a book that they feel a connection to or has sparked their interest level to read to the class as their project.

Throughout the course of this unit, the students will rehearse their chosen book at home with parents and at school with peers, practice their oral fluency skills, and hone their presentation skills. The unit will wrap up with each student getting up before the class dressed as one of the characters from their book selection and reading the story to the class. The students should use their time nightly to prepare for their Robert Munsch book presentations which will take place the week of  March 18 – 22nd.

The students have been given a booklet of stapled activity sheets for this project yesterday. This booklet is to go home and come back to school every day starting next week until the presentation date. Parents are asked to fill in the Practice Log at the back of this booklet regularly to indicate that their child has been practicing the reading of his/her chosen book! There is also a spot to give them constructive feedback as the students prepare.  Any activity work that is not completed in the time given in class at school during the day should be finished at home. You can also help your child with the planning of his/her costume and prop ideas to enhance the presentation. 

The rubric for the presentation is in your child’s booklet.

Yesterday, Mr. Jackson and I organized for a Robert Munsch impersonator to come in and imitate how Robert Munsch reads – he was absolutely FABULOUS! The students were engaged and many laughs were. Daniel the storyteller spoke about the importance of using sound effects, onomatopeia, different volume levels of voice, and the use of hand gestures!

Here are a few pictures from previous years of students on their presentation day:

Last week, the students worked on a cross-curricular activity involving art and science. As part of our Science unit on forces and movement, the students learned that the muscles in your body are attached to bones. Muscles pull on these bones. This is called muscular force. It allows you to move in many different ways. The students were challenged to create a sculpture using three pipe cleaners and aluminum foil strips to show how athletes use muscles! Check out their fantastic sculptures below! These will come home later this week to adorn your household decor!