News for May 1

News for May 1

At the end of the week we received three tadpoles! We talked about the life cycle of a frog and we are looking forward to watching them grow in their own tank, beside our fish Alpha and Beta.

This week the students finished the math unit on probability and started the unit on fractions. This week we looked at fractions as "part of a whole" and noted that "half" is a relative amount depending on the size of the whole. They also made a folded book and glued different fraction pictures on the pages.

In writing, the students did a writing assignment on the first few chapters of our read aloud book Pioneer Cat. It is the story of a pioneer family moving west across the United States and a young girls' attempts to keep her pet cat a secret. The students also wrote about our pioneer day in class.

On Tuesday, the class went to the gym to see a performance of the play Junk In The Attic by the Little Red Theatre. It was a story of how to solve conflicts and how to live a peaceful life.

On Thursday, the class pretended it was April 30, 1809. We spent the whole day without electric lights! In preparation for the day, the children learned how to handwash their kerchiefs and then they each ironed his/her kerchief. The students did their math using chalk and small blackboards, helped to prepare lunch and snacks and chose appropriate pastimes (wooden blocks, marbles, corking, sewing). We had apples and cheese for the morning snack, carrots, pickles, baked beans, cornbread pancakes (with homemade butter) and honey/maple syrup spelt "cookies". For an afternoon snack we popped popcorn and topped it with our homemade butter. (Many students asked for the recipe for the cornbread and it will be posted in a separate post in this blog.) The pioneer village projects are finished and are now on display in the hall.

The children also sewed beanbags. The same kind of beans we ate in the baked beans were used in dried form to stuff the beanbags (along with some wool fleece).

On Friday, we went outside and each student had a chance to try sawing wood. It's not as easy as it looks! They got a good sense of how hard pioneers had to work to make homes, furniture and firewood. Each child also used a piece of sandpaper to sand their own piece of wood for a future art project.

In music, we talked about and sang the Bobby McFerrin song, "Don't Worry Be Happy" and how he used different vocal sounds to create the music.

Watch and listen to the students show the different buildings of the village while singing our pioneer song.