The Week That Was, and Will Be...

This past week was a full, and eventful
one, and the week ahead should also prove to be a blur of activity
and excitement.

As I am sure you have heard by now, our
class has been spreading good cheer around the school through some
random acts that we have been performing. The flash mob dance we did
in Tiiu's class, then the surprise performance of the song “What I
Am” for Megan went a long way to perk up the day for Tiiu's class,
and Megan. In a circle meeting where we were discussing what we
might do next, the idea of decorating a class door, just like we had
done our own, came up. We have received a lot of compliments from
students, parents, and teachers, so we thought that might be a nice
act of kindness to share with a class. The trouble was picking one
class to share this with. There were strong arguments made for
younger classes, buddy classes, and classes of their peers (gr 5 or
6). In the end we opted to do a clandestine Random Act of Decoration
(RAD) and hit all the classrooms in the school. A week ago we
prepared in class, and decorated all the doors on the third floor
during the outdoor recess on Friday. The students were really
surprised, as were the teachers. It was fun to see how our students
'observed' the other classes reactions. In our debreif afterwards
they not only reflected on how great it made them feel to see the
reactions of the other classes, but also on how fun it was to do the
activity just thinking about how it might make their schoolmates
feel. We also decided that we had to do the doors on the second
floor, so this past Tuesday we did our preparations in the morning,
and hit all the doors on the second floor that afternoon. This time
there was even more excitement as the second floor is made up of the
younger grades, and they had not seen what happened on the third
floor yet. There were a lot of questions about who did this and how
it happened. The teachers played along, but they also made sure to
stop in and thank our class. There were a lot of smiling faces in
our class that afternoon, knowing how much excitement we had brought
to the other classes.

Some of the door designs are below from
our third floor RAD.

I am guessing that some of you also
have heard of our woodworking project. With luck these will be ready
to go home on Wednesday or Thursday. With some help from Donna
Weldon (thanks for dragging in your drill press!) we have been
crafting a little project. We worked on this in class on Wednesday
and Thursday this past week, and hope to put in some time this week
to get it all finished up. I will post some photos of the finished
products once we get them assembled and painted.

Our class also spent a portion of the
past week preparing to host, and perform at the December sharing.
The event was a huge success (Janet Veale is quoted as saying that it
was the best December sharing she has seen in 17 years at
Churchill!), and our performance, with our writing buddies, was one
of the main highlights of the show (so I was told). We had
re-written the 12 days of Christmas into the 12 days of Winter,
Churchill Styled. It was fun to write, and even more fun to perform.
There were a ton of laughs at the jokes that the students came up
with, and the acts that went with each day. By the end of the song
many of the classes were singing along with us. We are looking
forward to our next collaboration with our writing buddies (this was
our second performance at a sharing with them).

The week ahead will be a full one as
well. We have our Junior Math Olympics Monday morning on the third
floor. There will be sing alongs all week. On Thursday we will be
walking to Summit Alternative to observe their stock market day and
to do some reporting on it. Friday we have skating at Dulude Arena,
and the students have decided to have a 'gift and take' activity to
celebrate the upcoming winter break. This is an optional activity
where participants bring in a wrapped gift (under $7 they decided) if
they want to take part.

On top of all of this we have our
culminating activities for the book Hanna's Suitcase that we have
been looking at since November.

This week our student teacher Christina
will be joining us again, so that should also be exciting for
everyone.

Hold on, it is going to be a crazy
week!

Ray