News for September 16

News for September 16

The students finished their stories about their paintings. After reviewing good editing practice, these stories were edited by the children and I will type them up and use them to make a hall display.

Our guided reading groups began this week. Each day I meet with a different group of students to read together and talk about ways to improve our reading comprehension and vocabulary.

The students worked with the 9 letters in my last name to see how many words they could make. They discovered 57 ways to rearrange the letters to make new words. The children also looked at the word families for the homophones "right" and "write".

In math, the class continued to investigate the nature of numbers. One activity was to figure out why, when 3 consecutive numbers are added, does the the sum always equal to three times the middle number? For example, 4 + 5 + 6 = 15 or (5 + 5 + 5 = 15). Another was to investigate the number of ways to make a particular number (did you know there are 31 ways to make the sum of 6?). We discussed if zero is an odd or even number (it's even). We also looked at patterns in the 1-100 number chart and the 0-99 number chart.

We worked on our first class project of the year. As an extension to the students' interest in physics (recall Einstein was a physicist), we talked about how popcorn pops. Did you know that popcorn kernels are seeds and when they pop, they basically turn inside out? Then the students learned a bit about the history of popcorn. Children worked in pairs to decide how to best to report information to others orally and visually. These mini-reports were filmed and the final film can be found at the end of this posting.

The children each made his/her own art journal this week. They started by painting a cover on thick paper using watercolour paint. Then they folded paper and sewed the pages inside the cover.

Books read aloud this week:

Einstein by Nigel Hunter

Einstein by Rebecca Gomez

Popcorn by Tomie de Paola