News for March 26

News for March 26

This week the students did an experiment with fleece. On Monday morning, each student put some fleece in the toe of one of his/her shoes and then in the afternoon they each took out the pieces of fleece to see what changed. They wrote about their experiments comparing how the fleece looked before and after it was in the shoe and their theories on why the fleece turned into felt (heat, sweat or moisture and pressure).

The children began to write stories based on a magazine photograph. After picking a picture, each student planned their writing using the details in the photograph and then started to write their fiction stories.

The students used the wool they dyed a few weeks ago to start weaving a bookmark. We referred back to the book "Pelle's New Suit" where Pelle's mother used spun wool to weave cloth. Each child set up a cardboard loom with vertical lines of wool (the warp) and used different colours to weave over and under to create the horizontal lines (the weft). This is to experience the time and patience required to create cloth as discussed in our pioneer unit.

In math the students began the unit on fractions by concentrating on how a "whole" is divided into equal parts or fair shares. They created a "Fraction Book" by folding and cutting paper into various fractions to understand that one half of a whole may look different depending on how you divide it, the size of the whole and to understand that as the number of fair shares increases, the size of each fair share decreases (gets smaller).

The children planned and created short movies based on the book "The Thingamabob". In this story an elephant tries to figure out what an umbrella is. The groups chose an object and wrote down all the possible things it could be used for (for example, a toothbrush could be used as a broom). Also, the class created a commercial to let people know about their movies and the web address to go to, in order to see the movies (http://planet5movies.blogspot.com/). The commercial can be seen at the end of this posting.

The class saw a video about Easter and some of the other spring celebrations around the world. The students also listened to "spring" of Vivaldi's Four Seasons, featuring violinist Nigel Kennedy.

In computers, the class showed their understanding of fractions by creating "fraction flags" at:

http://www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/games/fractionflags/fractionflags.html

This is the commercial for the students' new movies. Visit

http://planet5movies.blogspot.com .