September 25 News

September 25 News

by Ms. Rawlinson

These photos show the students in gym class with Mr. Hinrichsen, making structures out of cards and finishing the Terry Fox Run.

This week I am writing the news because it was a four day week and we didn't have time to do it in the computer lab this week.

It was wonderful to see all the families at the BBQ and curriculum night this week. I am very proud of all the work that the class does and I'm glad you had a chance to see some of their work and learn more about the program in Room 5.

This week each student collected information about themselves and made a little "time capsule" book. They measured their height and weight, traced their hands and feet, wrote down their wishes and even included a photo and a lucky coin (from another country). As a class we wrote a letter to ourselves in June 2009. We sealed up the letter and 19 time capsule books and we won't open it until the end of school. It will be interesting to see what has changed and what hasn't.

The students learned how to use a graphic organizer to plan a fiction story. We figured out our names spelled backwards (mine is Ycnan Nosnilwar) and started to write a story. The children complied their reading responses to the book My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes. They used Kid Pix on the computer to type their writing and created a picture to go with their words (ex. The cat from Brazil ate a vitamin pill).

The class made some "circle art" by using black pen to trace around a juice lid and colouring in the shapes made from the overlapping lines. They also learned how to fold an origami duck and folded a family of ducks as a reading response to the classic story Make Way for Ducklings.

In math we practised the math strategies we know to help us solve problems. One activity was to count the number of stars drawn in one minute. The class learned why grouping by tens works so well. Counting by tens is faster than by 1, 2 or 5 and the number of groups of tens gives the tens unit in a two-digit number (place value).

Sept. 22 was the first day of fall and we talked about why this is a special day for the earth. We listened to the autumn movement of Vivaldi's classic The Four Seasons and conducted in time with the music using straws as batons.

We started to talk more about gravity in science. Did you know that a chair is like an anti-gravity device? The students built towers out of playing cards (just like Einstein liked to do as a child - we read that he made towers 14 stories high in his biography) and some students were overheard saying (as their towers fell), "Oh! I don't like gravity!"

Homework This Week

Students were asked to teach an adult how to fold an origami duck. They were given a sheet to fill out to reflect on how they think they did as a teacher. This sheet was sent home in the agendas on Thursday.