News for November 30

News for November 30

This week the students created a homemade advent calendar, learned about temperature and thermometers and attended an anti-bullying assembly.

In math, the class reviewed how to tell and write analog and digital time to the hour (0:00), half hour (0:30) and quarter hours (0:15 and 0:45). They also reviewed the time units and equivalents. (Many of these do not make"sense" and have to be memorized, for example, 1 year = 365 days.) Later in the week, we started to talk about temperature being the measurement of the amount of heat in something and how a thermometer is used to measure temperature. The children did an experiment using thermometers to measure the temperature of ice water, room temperature water and hot water. We also talked about "benchmark" temperature to understand relative temperatures. For example, room temperature is about 20°C, water freezes at 0°C and boils at 100°C. Normal human body temperature is 37°C. Did you know that the unit we use to measure temperature was developed by Anders Celsius, (1701-1744)? He was a scientist from Sweden.

The class talked about snow this week. Did you know that snowflakes are based on the six-sided polygon, the hexagon? Snowflakes have six branches and are that shape because of the angles of the hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a water molecule (H2O). We talked about how snowflakes "grow" inside clouds and learned about the man who first photographed snow, Wilson Bentley, did so over 150 years ago. The class also learned about Kenneth Libbrecht, a modern scientist who studies snowflakes and can "grow" them in his lab. Here is a video that he made that we watched in class:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k0canuRhwHs

The children used kirigami (Japanese for "cut paper") techniques to fold and cut beautiful paper snowflakes. The students experimented with different colours, thicknesses and sizes of paper to make paper snowflakes. We've begun to make a winter display in the hallway outside of our classroom.

After being shown a box of "snowflake" Ritz crackers, the children noticed that the snowflakes crackers pictured were not scientifically accurate. The crackers have snowflakes based on an octagon (8 sides) and real snowflake designs are based on a hexagon (6 sides). The class had a chance to eat some of the crackers and we then decided to write letters to the Christie cracker company to let them know that their cracker designs are not scientifically correct and why. These letters will be mailed to the company next week. Let's hope they write us back!

In guided reading, the children worked in small groups to read the book, Mud Puddle, with the learning goal to identify the various ways that a reader knows that a story is fiction. Using the text, illustrations and inference, the children discussed the fiction characteristics in this book.

The class learned about the Christian tradition of an advent calendar. An advent calendar is used to count down the days until Christmas. The word "advent" means "arrival" in Latin. The tradition in Ms. R's class is to create a more personal advent calendar to count down the days until the Winter Holidays. Each child made a special advent calendar package containing treats and small presents plus a letter to the child who will receive the package. Each day, at the end of our morning message, the star student randomly picks a student name and that child gets to take home that day's package. Since the children must wait their turn and someone will be the last one to get the package, this activity teaches patience!

The class began to talk about matter in science. Matter is the "stuff" that makes up everything in the world. The three states of matter are: solids, liquids and gases. The children worked to identify examples of each of these three states. In connection to our math unit, the students talked about water vapour (a gas above 100°C , room temperature water (a liquid at the same temperature as the air in the room, at around 20°C) and ice (a solid below 0°C).

Finally, our amaryllis plant now measures an incredible 42 centimeters tall!

Books read aloud this week:

Winter's Coming by Jan Thornhill
Mud Puddle by Robert Munsch
The Secret Life of a Snowflake by Kenneth Libbrecht
The Art of the Snowflake by Kenneth Libbrecht
Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
The Tomten by Astrid Lindgren
The Tomten and the Fox by Astrid Lindgren