It’s been a bit of a catch-up week for us so you will notice we did not complete an Alphabet Letter.  Rather, we’re going to finish everything we’ve started so we can start fresh in a few days.

Speaking of fresh, we had an experiment go wrong this week.  We’ve been looking after this sugar pumpkin for the past couple of weeks and thought we’d carve it for a baby jack-o-lantern. Whoops!  It completely caved in and all of the innards came swooshing out all over the table when we tried to lift it up.  The children were very keen to look at it and give it a poke.  The pumpkin smell was a little troubling for the first part of the day.

We’re a little behind in making our October self-portraits as duty called for us to make our Boho Birds, but we’re all caught up now and what a difference from September!  We had fun drawing in the backgrounds.  We reviewed our Big, Bright and Beautiful criteria for the children. Big means to fill your space,  Bright means to use five colours or more and Beautiful is to do your personal best.  Don’t you think the children did a great job?  We were delighted for sure.

Talk about filling your space…look at the size of these painted pumpkins!  We read Too Many Pumpkin by Linda White and Megan Lloyd, then proceeded to draw pumpkin outlines with ribs using white pastel.  This is a favourite project of ours, from deepspaceparkle  It was very interesting to watch the children work on a large scale – the biggest piece of paper (12” x 18”) we’ve asked them to fill this year.  It can be hard to go big.  Not all children realize they really have to move their hands and arms to stretch to fill the corners of a big sheet of paper.  They need their helping hand (their non-writing hand) to hold the paper down or the whole thing will slide.  It’s a lot of think about.

It seemed we just got the outlines done when it was time to paint the pumpkins.  Colour mixing is fun and an important skill, so using palettes of orange, red and yellow paint and a single paintbrush, the children mixed the colours for various shades of orange in each section of their pumpkin.  We will cut them out next week and decorate appropriately.

Of course, this week’s big event was our Hallowe’en Centres Party.  We’ve learned through sad experience we cannot host our party and participate in the annual Ridgeview Parade and Assembly (next Wednesday, October 31) all in a day.  The children (and teachers) get overtired, self-regulation is almost out the window and nobody wants to go Trick or Treating (“Can’t someone go out and bring the candy to me?”  True story).  It’s too much.  So by dividing the two events, we get twice as much fun and it’s all round SO much more enjoyable for everyone.

With the help of our UBC Teacher Candidates and parent volunteers, the children created math patterns, finished their bats, made necklaces and spooky trees, coloured Hallowe’en pictures and rolled out the playdough.  We had a lot of giggles and admired everybody’s creativity.

On a more solemn note, one of the Me to We initiatives that we carry out every year at Ridgeview is the “We Scare Hunger” campaign.  We’re asking every student at school to please bring a couple of kid-friendly, non-perishable food items and either place them in the boxes upstairs in the main hall, or bring them to the classroom and we take them upstairs from here.  We’re encouraging the children to think about what they like to eat, and that’s what they should bring to school.  Our donations will be given to our sister school, Grandview Elementary in Vancouver, to restock the school’s food bank.

Upcoming Events and Reminders

Monday, October 29 is Photo Retakes.  Please let myself or Mrs. Campbell know directly or via email if your child is having their photo taken so we do not miss anyone.

Please return your Library Books for a new one.

Wednesday, October 31 is Ridgeview’s Annual Hallowe’en Parade and Assembly.  Parents are welcome to line the hallways and watch up parade through the school.  Please do not ask your child to stop in the hallway for a photo – we don’t want to be separated from the rest of the parade.  We sent home an orange notice on Thursday with all the details.  We also sent it home via your Remind text.

Thursday, November 1 is our delayed start at 10:40 am.

You can now visit the cardproject.ca to see our class’s art work.  Make your order by this Sunday and your delivery will be here at the end of November.