News for December 3

News for December 3

This four-day week was busy in Room 5.
At the beginning of the week, the students learned about the Christian tradition of making "advent " calendars to mark the days until Christmas. The word "advent" means arrival in Latin, so we decided to create our own version of this type of calendar, counting down the days until the winter holidays begin. Each student folded a modular origami container (actually a hexahedron) and filled it with some small toys and treats and a handwritten wish for a happy holiday. Every day after the morning message,

the star student picks out a name and that student gets the special treat for that day (on Friday, there were 10 days left before the holidays).

The grade two students went to see a presentation by the Toronto Police Department about personal safety. During this time, the grade 3 students did their first EQAO practice by completing a reading activity.

As an extension activity to our study of the Willy Wonka movie, the children each "invented" a new candy. The task was to create a candy name, a candy company name, a label and a poster advertising the candy. These are now on display in our hallway.

The students shared their jokes and riddles. They enjoyed reading joke books from our school library and each student selected a joke, practised reading it aloud and then were filmed telling the joke. These were turned into a little movie:



The class learned about "Snowflake Bentley" the first man to photograph snowflakes over 140 years ago. The students then had time to create paper snowflakes to decorate our class and some were so inspired they made extras to take home!

In math, we started a unit on 2D geometry (2D = two dimensional or flat). We reviewed the names of shapes and the students hunted for examples of those shapes around the classroom. They discovered that the easiest shape to find is a rectangle. Squares and circles could be found but were a bit harder to find and pentagons/hexagons/heptagons/octogons are really hard to find. Starting this week, each child began the day doing two math problems on blackboards, to keep practising addition and subtraction questions.

As a connection to our science unit on magnets, the students created a "magnet man" figure with magnets on the ends of his hands and feet. The children are now planning stories starring this new character.

In computers, we looked at Google maps to see satellite photos of our school. The children also played some math addition and subtraction games. The sites are:
http://maps.google.com/ and http://www.funbrain.com/.