News for December 21

News for December 21

This last week of school for 2018, the children learned about playing cards, made paper lanterns and even learned why popcorn pops!

The BIG news from this week was that the children worked very hard to sort, count and add up the money that was collected for the Daily Bread Food Bank of Toronto. The students worked to sort the money into groups. Then they worked in groups to count the coins and finally we used calculators to add up the sums. One bag, a pile of toonies added up to $222.00. The grand total was $850.37! This project was a great way to apply math skills. Well done!

The class finished learning the history of over 15 different holiday songs. Many songs are Christmas songs, but we also looked at a Diwali song and a Hanukkah song and some are simply about winter. It was wonderful to hear the students singing along to songs while working on projects in the class. On Thursday, our class joined the rest of the school in the auditorium for our school's traditional sing-a-long time. For each song, the children learned the country it was from, when it was written, how many years ago it was written, plus we learned new vocabulary and listened for the rhyming words. One song we studied was "The Twelve Days of Christmas" that was written in England in 1780. When we sang this song, we were singing words that have been sung at this time of year for 228 years.

The students learned about playing cards. They explored the designs on the cards and sorted the cards by design, colour and number. Did you know that there are 52 cards in a standard pack of cards? There are two colours, red and black, four "suits", hearts, diamonds, clubs, spades, and numbers from 1 (ace) to ten plus kings, queens and jacks. Each child now knows how to do a magic trick and at the
end of the week, they played the game, Go Fish, in their table groups.

The children created more decorations for our class holiday tree using pipe cleaners and beads. They learned some folding and cutting techniques to create paper lanterns. By folding cardstock paper, drawing designs, cutting out "windows" and taping in pieces of clear red plastic, the students made unique paper lanterns with an LED light inside. Did you know that the word LED means "Light Emitting Diode"?

On Friday, the students wore their pajamas and brought their stuffies for the last day of school of 2018.  The children even wore their pajamas to the school library! In the afternoon, we popped popcorn and had some treats while they watched the animated holiday classic, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Did you know that popcorn kernels are actually seeds and popcorn pops because a small drop of water inside heats up to 100 degrees Celsius and explodes and cooks the seeds when the liquid water turns to steam?

Finally, at the end of the day on Friday, we all said a happy good bye to each other with wishes of "See you next year!" :-)

Books read aloud this week:

How the Grinch Stole Christmas by Dr. Suess (book and DVD)
Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer (DVD)
The Family Christmas Tree by Tomie de Paola
Look-A-Likes Christmas by Joan Steiner
The Twelve Days of Christmas by Jan Brett