News for January 18

Look at our amaryllis now!

News for January 18

The big news this week is the launch of our new weekly internet show...The Room 5 Interview Show. Every week, two students will interview a school staff member. This week the guest was our school's principal, Mrs. Farrelly. The video of this interview can be found at the end of this posting.

The children finished their books about collage this week. After writing paragraphs on the history of collage and reflecting on the art process, each student created a book containing the writing and the collages they made. These are now on display on the bulletin board in the hall outside our classroom.

In science, the students learned about the different kinds of forces in the world and if the force is a "push" or a "pull" (for example, the force of gravity is a "pull"). We also talked about how forces can cause movement, change speed and/or direction of the movement or change the shape of shape of an object. In our computer time the students visited a site to help reinforce concepts of forces and motion. Here is the link:
http://www.gamequarium.com/forcesandmotion.html .

The students learned the history of  the Canadian flag. Did you know that our country is 146 years old and our flag is only 48 years old? We are learning about Canada and its flag as a class. As part of the research on different countries that the students are doing, they examined the flag designs of their chosen countries and began to plan and paint flags for their projects.

The children created colour wheel using playdough. They reviewed the concepts of the three primary colours, created the three secondary colours by mixing the appropriate colours of playdough and learned about the concept of complementary colours. These are now on display in our classroom.

The children visited their reading buddies in Room 101 this week and taught them how to make the paper elephant model they learned how to create last week. After the pairs of students read books together.

In math, the students continued the unit on Data Management. This week the class learned about circle graphs (also known as a pie graph). They also practiced drawing and labeling pictographs and bar graphs. Each child created his/her own survey this week. They each set up a survey question, a cup labeled "yes" and a cup labeled "no" on their desks. The students went around and answered everybody's survey question. The children then tallied the results, created a bar graph of the information and wrote about what the survey and graph tells about our class. Did you know that if we were to pick a game to play, that dodgeball would be an excellent choice? That's because all the students in our class said they liked to play dodgeball in a survey.

After reading the book, One Grain of Rice, the children made a connection to our calendar pattern, where the numbers are doubling every day. The book illustrates the power of doubling over a short period of time. The class also viewed a video of a similar story. Here is the video:




Books read aloud this week:

Follow That Map! A book about mapping skills by Scot Ritchie
One Grain of Rice by Demi
The Bookshop Dog by Cynthia Rylant
Canada's Maple Leaf - The story of our flag by Ann-Maureen Owens

The Room 5 Interview Show - The guest this week was our school's principal, Mrs. Farrelly. The interviewers were Katherine and Nandana.