Tag Archives: fun

The Over/Under Challenge

(This post was co-authored by Heather and Mia.)

Hello, visitors to Huzzah!

We have been challenged by Mr. Toft’s class in Ottawa, Canada to do something fun: the Over/Under Challenge. We’re showing you our completed challenge. You’ll have to watch the video to see how high we got! We have also challenged our buddy class (Ms. Bulger’s at Climb High!) to do the same challenge and we hear they are pretty fast.

You’ll notice in our video that we mess up our count in two places–counting too quickly and then too slowly. If you don’t think our final count is accurate, try turning off the audio to check our count. You’ll also notice some of us wore silly pants. That helped us a lot. 🙂

For those of you who are confused about what we are talking about, we will tell you what the over/under challenge is all about. The rules of the challenge is to pass the ball in a circle with the pattern of over and under. You are not allowed to drop the ball or throw it to other people otherwise you have to restart. The object of this whole challenge is to pass the ball as many times as you can within the time span of one minute. You have to make an UNEDITED video of your class doing the over/under challenge.

Happy Huzzahnians!

Happy Huzzahnians!

We hope to see your completed over/under challenge videos–please tell us in a comment if you try it.

Good luck!

Classroom Olympics–the Pairs Event

We may not be Olympians, but we can dream–and we can pretend.

Today I invited Huzzahnians to dress up in pairs in honour of Mr. Laurie, former figure skating champion, to compete in our own Olympic event. We used the term “pairs” loosely, as you can see in the video. Students brought costumes, designed and practiced routines, and performed in front of their fans on behalf of their countries. They were judged against the criteria that the class established. The two very serious and highly trained judges, Mrs. B and Ms. Smith, used the old-fashioned 6.0 scoring scale.

The performances were entertaining and fun, as was the medal ceremony. The event was capped off with a rousing chorus of  ‘O Grapelandia on behalf of the gold medalists. We could almost hear the people in Vancouver singing with us.

Enjoy!

We know how to have a good time!

The last week of school is always melancholy for me: I’m happy for the approach of summer, but sad to see the school year end. So the best plan is to go out on a high note.

  1. We played marimbas for Monday’s Gr. 7 grad–and we sounded great!
  2. We tie-dyed t-shirts with a logo designed by Chaeyoon and our names on it.
  3. We painted Ms Snowdon’s car–just look at the results–


More fun to come as we head out to beach day in the rain…

Holiday Cheer Through Silly Gifts

On the last day of school we held a Wacky Gift Exchange. The rules were simple: bring a wrapped, non-store bought gift, and secretly give it to Ms Smith.
Ahead if time we talked about the difference between Wacky and Junky: ie a Barbie is ok, but a Barbie with hair cut off and marker on her face is not. The gifts ranged from helpful to hilarious, and there was a lot of laughing.
Here’s how the worked:
  • The pile of gifts was placed in the middle of our circle of chairs.
  • Student names were randomly drawn.
  • The first person chose a gift from the pile and opened it, saying: “Wow, I always wanted a…..”
  • The group responds with ooohs and aaahs.
  • The rest of the people, in turn, can take from the pile or “steal” from another person, who can either take from the pile or “steal” from another player.
  • Gifts can be stolen only three times.
  • The very last player can take any gift.

As you can see in the slide show below we had a blast and everyone had a great attitude about the “gifts” they received.

(I am experimenting with different slide show formats–let me know what you think of this Image Loop. I do find ads & logos distracting, but is this tool still worth using?)

(Temporary) Winter Wonderland

Well, it didn’t last.

(Spoke too soon: 24 hours later–now have 15cm of new snow!)

We are back to green grass and snow-free skies. But that’s ok, because we can see the snow accumulation on the mountains (where it belongs!). While it was here we enjoyed it. We dashed around the soccer field and then came in and wrote poems. Look for the results on student blogs soon. And enjoy our first snow of 2008 in the video below.