News for February 25

News for February 25

It was another 4-day week in Room 101, but there were many special activities.

On Wednesday, we celebrated Pancake Day by mixing, cooking and eating pancakes. It was like we had a pancake restaurant in our classroom! We talked about the celebrations around the world at this time of year, Mardi Gras and Shrove Tuesday as the time before the Christian observation of Lent. We read Pancakes, Pancakes! by Eric Carle and learned about how a boy and his mom made pancakes in the days before electricity and compared it to how we made pancakes. The children also learned a poem about making pancakes (a copy of this poem was sent home on Friday).

Now that the students know all the letter-sounds, we started to learn the new sounds that two letters make together. This week they learned the sounds of the letter combinations "th" and "sh". A game we play at school is, "What words do you know that have the ___ sound?" This is a fun game to play at home with your child.

The students made snowman pins this week. They wore these pins on Thursday when our whole school celebrated the winter "Carnivale", a celebration that is popular in Quebec. The morning class went to an assembly were we listened to a music group that plays Latin American music.
Both classes had the chance to go to another classroom to solve winter-themed puzzles. We also saw the snowman mascot, Bonhomme Carnivale!

The students explored a discovery bin filled with different kinds of mirrors and clear, colour pieces. They looked at flat mirrors, convex (rounded out) and concave (rounded in). The children looked through coloured plastic pieces and reviewed how mixing two colours together make a new colour.

The class learned about the blues musician B. B. King. We read a book that features him in a story where he has lost his shoe and some sock puppet characters help him along as he tries to find it. Along with this book is a DVD movie of the story. As always, more information on the books we read can be found at http://planet5books.blogspot.com/.

Here is the B. B. King movie: