Fun Fair and Baby Time

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….a busy three days, part 2

Last Saturday, the parent council at my school hosted the long awaited Fun Fair. For the cost of a wrist band the students enjoy an abundance of fun activities for four hours. There were inflatables, a dunk tank, face painting, games of chance with prizes, cotton candy, popcorn, a cake walk, a photo booth, video games, planting stations, video games, candy kabobs, fire trucks and police cars to explore, music, a silent auction and so much more.

I was suppose to go in the dunk tank but the water was too cold for me and I had been promised warmish water. I was hoping that as the day progressed the water would have warmed up but because the hose runs continuously it never really changes temperature. No one really seemed to notice that I bowed out. The grade 5s gladly took over my time slot and took turns all day sitting in the tank waiting to be dunked.

I did volunteer to man one of the inflatables for an hour with one other parent. There was a steady stream of children climbing up the steep ladder and coming down the equally steep slides. I was surprised that some parents allowed their ‘babies’ to go on this apparatus. Their little legs couldn’t get up the ladder very quickly and they slowed down the momentum of the ride. A couple of times we (actually the other mom) had to go up the ladder and bring the children down.

One of the highlights for me was the silent auction. This year every class painted a ceramic plate or teapot which were professionally fired. They were all beautiful  and every item was bid on.

There were lots of other items to bid on and I ended up with a beautiful pot of flowering plants, a set of necklaces, a floral print with cards and a gift certificate for a haircut. I donated two of my paintings and my friend L and I offered a ‘Tea’ for up to 4 students. The last item went for over $100.00.

All in all it was a very successful fun fair. Here are a few more shots of some of the many activities that took place that day.

When the silent auction closed, I gathered up my merchandise and headed home where our daughter and granddaughter were waiting for me but more of that in the next post.

Cheers for now!

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A Busy Three Days

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….as May comes to an end I can breathe a sigh of relief

May and June are two of the busiest months for me. Many people assume because the school year is close at hand that my workload starts to diminish as well. Nothing could be further from the truth.

May started with tryouts for the girls’ soccer team and then practices three times a week. Last week the girls played their tournament and won so practices continue for the next two weeks before they move on to the semi finals. I head up the Forest of Reading book club and last week we had our year end celebration. I wrote about that here.

One of my other pet projects is raising money for the Heart and Stroke Foundation by running a Jump Rope for Heart day. I’ve been doing this for 17 years. Every year I think that the fund raising won’t do as well as previous years and the children and the community always come together and surprise me with their generosity. Two weeks ago we had the kick off assembly for Jump Rope for Heart and sent home the pledge envelopes. On Thursday I was worried because only 12 envelopes had been returned. On Friday I was overwhelmed with the number of returns. Over 100 envelopes came back and according to one of the parents the on-line contributions were higher than previous years. Our goal this year was to raise $8 600.00. It looks like we’ve gone well above that number. I’ll know better in the next few days when the last of the envelopes come in.

Friday was a hot sunny day for our actual skipping event. Our office assistant and her husband supplied us with music for the hour while the entire school headed outside and skipped to their heart’s content. Despite the heat everyone seemed to have a good time. There were prizes for skippers who showed a lot of effort. I chose about 8 teachers to go around and select children who they thought were really working hard. These students were given a yellow ticket that they could redeem for a new skipping rope or small football. A special thanks to the Heart and Stroke Foundation for supplying the prizes.

The next two days proved to be just as busy. On Saturday we had our Fun Fair at the school and our daughter and granddaughter spent Saturday and part of Sunday with us. More about these two days in a post to follow.

Making Journals with Kids

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….I’ve always wanted to try this technique of making an art journal from one sheet of watercolour paper

As many of you know I run a book club at my school that runs for about 5 months. The books that we read all come from the Forest of Reading program which feature Canadian authors. There are different books for different levels of readers. Each program is named after a tree. For example, the primary English picture books are called Blue Spruce and the books for the junior grades are named Silver Birch.

I usually start with over 100 readers from grades 3 to 5. Each student is given a passport and each time they finish reading a book they fill in the passport with a summary of the book. They then go to the expert reader (a teacher or grade 5 student) and are questioned about that particular book. Each time they answer the questions successfully they receive a credit or two, depending on the length and difficulty of the book. This year they were given the goal of obtaining a minimum of 12 credits in order to participate in the year end celebration.

It is a very doable goal, but some students became frustrated when the book they wanted to read had been checked out. There were 120 copies of the English books and 60 copies of the French books. In the end 34 students reached the goal and one student managed to read every single book. There were exactly 50 titles to choose from. This was a record for the book club.

For our celebration we organized two activities for the students. The first activity was a drama workshop that featured one of the Silver Birch books. It was run by our dynamic drama teacher.

After that we were fortunate enough to book an author who had written one of this years non-fiction entries. Caroline Fernandez wrote Boredom Busters and talked to the children about the steps one has to go through to publish a book. The fact that amazed all of us was that for an $18.00 book the author received only 87 cents. Her presentation was very interesting and she loved the the fact that some of the students in the room had made some of the crafts from her book. 9781782491057_z

At lunch we invited the expert readers to come and join us for lunch. We ordered pizza and had juice and popsicles.

After lunch I taught the students how to make an art journal using one sheet of watercolour paper. The trickiest part was folding the paper so two of my colleagues who helped me with organizing the day pre-folded the paper. We only made the first two folds because the size of the paper was a little too large for small hands to manage but the students made the remaining folds. Then the paper was cut in three places and the folding began.

Each student was given two pieces of cardboard that they could decorate any way they wanted. I provided them with scrapbook paper, stickers, stamps, collage papers, letters, and markers and pencils. Once the covers were decorated the end papers of the folded journal were glued to the covers. Each student was also given one or two colourful elastics to hold their journals shut.

The students had a wonderful time making their personal journals and some of them started to draw and paint in them as soon as they were finished. Here are a few of the finished projects. If you would like to try making one of these journals watch the video following the picture gallery.

Here is video for making the journals:

Making a simple journal