Orange Shirt Day

On Monday September 30, 2019, Capitol Hill School will recognize the Indigenous children who were sent away to residential schools in Canada by encouraging students to wear an orange shirt. Orange Shirt Day began in Williams Lake in 2013 and has since spread to schools across B.C. and Canada.To learn more about orange shirt day and Phyllis' story, please refer to the link provided.

The “orange shirt” in Orange Shirt Day refers to the new shirt that Phyllis Webstad was given to her by her grandmother for her first day of school at St. Joseph’s Mission residential school in British Columbia. When Phyllis got to school, they took away her clothes, including her new shirt. It was never returned. To Phyllis, the colour orange has always reminded her of her experiences at residential school and, as she has said, “how my feelings didn’t matter, how no one cared and I felt like I was worth nothing. All of us little children were crying and no one cared.”

http://www.orangeshirtday.org

Terry Fox Day!

On Thursday September 26, 2019 the students in Capitol Hill School were apart of the National School Run in support of the Terry Fox Foundation. In the morning we attended an assembly where we watched acknowledge the land, sang O'Canada, watched an inspiring video of Terry's Marathon of Hope journey, heard Terry's words from his diary.

In our classroom, we made a scrapbook page of Terry Fox and images of Canada and worked through a Terry Fox math challenge. It was challenging for many students!

At 1:00 we met our buddies from Mrs. Kousouris' class to run the field. Each loop was 0.5 km long! Our goal as a school was to take Terry to the Pacific Ocean. We ran enough kilometers to get him to Medicine Hat, Alberta.

Design Challenge #1

This week students were given a challenge to build a tower. The criteria the students were given was the tower must be free standing and as tall as possible. The only materials available to use were straws, popsicle sticks, masking tape, elastics. Students collaborated with a partner to design and build a tower. There were lots of conversations between each pair of students so they re-adjusted their tower or added to it to make it more stable. Next week we will write about our successes, challenges encountered and the next steps to make the tower better.

Beginning The Year with Sorting

This week we have begun discussing different places we find sorting in our world. Students came up with lots of ideas. For example, food at the grocery store, clothes in my drawer, animals in the zoo, library books, classroom supplies, and many more. Through exploration, the Grade 1/2's figured out that we can sort items by colour, shape, size and thickness. Then we began working with Attribute blocks to organize our work using colour. Students recorded the information into their notebook.