News for January 8

News for January 8

This week we began talking about poetry. The students listened to poems, wrote poems and read poems. The students wrote list poems in their journals, then after reviewing 2D shapes, they wrote list poems about pictures they drew using 2D shapes (these are now on display in our hallway). This is a list poem we wrote together:

Our Aquarium

fish (2 goldfish and 1 algae eater)
water (to swim in)
cylinders (3 tubes)
little stones (pink and yellow)
plant (pretty and to play in)

The class studied the rhyming stories of Dr. Seuss. We noticed that often Dr. Seus made up words to make a rhyme (for example, "There's a findow in my window"). The students used this idea to create our version of his book, "There's a Wocket in my Pocket". The children each wrote and illustrated a part of this story. We also shared a read together of "Chicken Soup with Rice" by Maurice Sendak and listed the rhyming words to see which were rhyming and spelling partners (for example, nice and twice) and which were rhyming partners but not spelling partners (for example, soup and droop).


The students made large folders to use a portfolios for storing their best work from term one. Each term they will put selected work into these portfolios to help them see how they have improved over the school year.


In math, the students reviewed 2D shapes. They learned about Chinese tangram puzzles. These are 7 shapes, or tans, that are arranged into different pictures. The children were challenged to solve tangram puzzles in 30 seconds - and each student managed to do 17 puzzles in under 10 minutes! Then they each designed an original tangram puzzle and the class then solved all the student-made tangrams. Later in the week, the class studied 3D figures and reviewed the parts of a 3D figure (faces, vertices and edges).

We talked a lot about the world's new tallest building, the Burj Dubai in the United Arab Emerates. It is over 160 stories high and is as tall as the CN tower with the Eiffel tower on top. That is almost one kilometer! During computer time we watched a video on how they built it. It can be seen at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LjTWSKbfiU.
We also played tangram games and Dr. Seuss story games at these sites:
http://addictinggames.com/tangramgame.html
www.seussville.com/games

The children started to write fiction stories this week and they each created a large painting of the most exciting part of the story.