News for May 6

News for May 6

The big news for this week was the preparations for Mother's Day. The children each made a card and a beaded necklace. When making the necklace,

each child chose and counted out 10 beads and used their "pinchy fingers" to thread the beads on elastic cord. Students remarked that the classroom was like a jewellery store! The children then wrapped the gifts in tissue paper and fastened it with tape.

We have started our unit on plants. This week the children looked at bean seeds and used magnifying glasses to look at all the features. This is an important step, as the seed will go through many changes as it grows into a plant and the students need to appreciate and remember the characteristics of the bean seeds. We recorded words like, black, brown, hard, smooth and the fact that each seed has a small white oval on its side. We read a book about vegetables that grow above and below the soil and the class looked at a picture of a fully grown bean plant. I asked the class to take a good look at the bean plant and the bean seed and to think about their theories on how the plant grows (i.e. Is there a tiny plant inside the seed that just gets bigger?)

The students also learned the 3 things that plants need to live: soil, water and sun. The class learned the words to the song "Mister Golden Sun" to help them understand the importance of the sun to our world.

As always, more information about the books we read in class can be found at:

http://planet5books.blogspot.com/

We took the weather details that we tracked for each school day in April and graphed the information as a pictograph. We learned that most days were sunny and we only had one cold day. This lesson also introduced the concept of reading information off the y-axis of a graph (i.e. you don't have to count the pictures, you can just read the number off the y-axis on the left).

The children are learning to apply their math skills to new situations. I set out a bin of plastic animals and some students made repeating patterns, other sorted them by colours and others put them in "10 frame" grids in order to count them by skip counting by tens.