News for September 25

News for September 25

This week marked the second week of our visiting student teacher, Bonnie Mok from the master's degree program at the Institute of Child Study, OISE/University of Toronto. This is the same teacher preparation course that I completed.

In math, the students worked on understanding place value (for example, 17 is different from 71 because the place of the digits gives different values in the tens place and the ones place). We also talked about ordinal numbers (for example, 1st, 2nd, 3rd).

The students created a class "time capsule". They each recorded information about themselves in a small book (height, weight, wishes and predictions) and included a photo and a lucky penny. We produced a class video, showcasing the work we have done so far in Room 5. It will be fun to open up the time capsule at the end of the school year and look at what changed and what didn't over the 10 months that we are together.

theclassreadastorywrittenbymsrthathadnospacesbetweenthewordsandsentencesnocaptialsand
noperiods (The class read a story written by Ms. R that had no spaces between words and sentences, no captials and no periods). They realized how difficult it is to read such a story and learned why punctuation is important and that they each have the responsibility to remember to reread their work and make sure that it can be read easily.

All the students in the school participated in the annual Terry Fox Run to raise money for cancer research. Our class ran around the neighbouhood and raised $63.02 for this charity.

We learned about Rosh Hashannah (Jewish New Year) and ate traditional apples and honey. We also made time to talk about the first day of fall (September 22) and the reason for the seasons. As well, the students listened to Antonio Vivaldi's "Autumn" from his Four Seasons composition. It was fun to listen to music written almost 300 years ago.


On Friday, we had our first shared cooking experience making spaghetti sauce. The students each took responsibility for a tomato, choosing, washing, and chopping it to make tomato sauce. During this time they wrote in their journals about how to make the sauce and spaghetti. At the end of the day we ate our little meal together, pasta, sauce and freshly grated parmesean cheese. It was so good most children asked for seconds (and thirds...). If you would like to know how we made our sauce, please visit:

http://thatsakeeper.blogspot.com/