News for February 19

News for February 19

We did a variety of things this (short) week. First were our daily discussions of the 2010 Olympic games in Vancouver, British Columbia. We are keeping track of the medals and photos of athletes on the wall outside of our classroom.

In writing, the students have been working hard on their retelling of the fairy tale, "The Little Red Hen". They learned how to use quotation marks to show the words that a character is saying. After editing their work, they used circle shaped paper to write their good copies. The students are working on creating a "storybox" by painting cylinder shaped boxes and creating small cardboard characters to include inside the box.

In math, the grade 3 students began the unit on multiplication by understanding how simple multiplication is just a faster way to add groups of the same number (as in 3X2 means "three groups of 2"). The grade 2 students reviewed addition of two-digit numbers with and without regrouping. They also practised solving word problems.

In social studies, we began the unit on pioneers by doing a "thought experiment" to imagine what life was like two hundred years ago.

We celebrated two holidays this week: Pancake Tuesday and Chinese New Year. The students learned that Pancake Tuesday historically is a Christian celebration (Shrove Tuesday) when people would feast on foods made with butter, sugar and eggs before Lent. So the class made and enjoyed pancakes with real maple syrup. Chinese New Year is based on a different calendar and the children figured out that they were born in the year of the snake (most grade 3's) or horse (most grade 2's). If a birthday is before mid-February, the animal is from the previous year. Red is a lucky colour in the Chinese tradition and we used lucky "lai see" red envelopes to create paper lanterns. This activity offered a great review of 2D and 3D geometry as the students folded the envelopes from a rectangle to a pentagon to a hexagon and then stapled them together in the figure of an octohedron (on the inside).