Over the two weeks leading up to UN day we invited family members into our class to teach us a little bit about the countries we are all from. We have been extremely lucky because someone from every single child's family came and participated! We saw pictures from different countries, tried some snacks from these places and we heard stories and songs. The class even got to play some traditional games and pretend to be animals from certain countries. We all had such a wonderful time learning about each other! Thank you to all the families that helped contribute and come in to share a little bit of your country and culture with us!

Our latest Star Name is Alex! This time we all had a chance to have a go at writing some new letters such as 'e' and 'x'. Alex has one younger brother and likes the book "The Wheels on the Bus". Just like the two Star Names before him, Alex's favorite thing to do is to go outside and play!

Here's what the class had to say about the letters in Alex's name:

• 'A' looks like a mountain
• 'l' looks like a slide
• 'e' looks like a twirl
• 'x' looks like a wrong mark

Alex your name has helped us learn more about writing different letters! Now we can recognize these letters in books too!

We learned that in some books pictures had labels around them to help the reader learn more about the topic. K1PA decided to try labeling together and what better thing to label than our class teacher, Miss Pana! So, we pulled out some Post its and began looking at Miss Pana's body parts that we could label! Some of us used initial sounds to label, others who weren't so sure drew pictures to label and put the post it on the correct body part. After this we decided to label around the classroom! This time a couple of our classmates and even Mrs. Mano got a Post it stuck on them!

Before we went off on our October break we finished off the first part of our school year with the UN Day celebration. We talked about being risk-takers when we each went on stage to present where we were from. The children were very enthusiastic and excited when we entered different rooms and learned about certain countries. This year K1PA got a taste of China, Japan, Canada and the U.K. Thank you to all the parents involved in setting up such a wonderful day for the children! Here are some photos of UN Day fun!

Through the interview with Jan we discovered that Sam and Jan had many things in common! They both had one brother, however, Jan's brother is still a baby and Sam's brother is in Grade 1. Jan, like Sam, also likes to go outside and play. Jan also revealed that his favorite books are Tintin books!

When we looked at Jan's name we describe the letters like this:
1. 'J' has a straight line
2. 'J' has a curve like a road going down. It also looks like a rope!
3. 'a' looks like a circle
4. 'n' looks like a mountain!

Here are the portraits we all drew of Jan. Many of us are getting very good at writing the      small letter 'a'!

As a part of our study on the letter 's' we became interested in SPIDERS! We looked at books about spiders and saw pictures of real ones. As we carefully observed we found out the following things:

1. Spiders have 8 eyes
2. Spiders have 8 legs
3. Each leg has 5 parts or joints
4. Spiders have fangs
5. Spiders have 4 or 6 spinners

We had to "scrunch", "stuff" and "stick" in order to create our own giant spider in the class. Together we named him Slidey!

We concluded our work on the letter 's' by making some spider sandwiches! This involved the children having to count 8 eyes (raisins) and 8 legs (pretzel sticks). They cut two slices of bread into circles using cups to cut them out and then stuck everything together using peanut butter! Yummy, sticky, scary, spider sandwiches!

Take a look at all our work!