News for December 8

News for December 8

It was a short, 4-day week, but the students in Room 5 were busy as usual.

There was a lot of music in the class this week. First, the students are learning the two songs for our concert performance on the evening of December 20. Second, the students wrote a song (more on this below). The children have copies of the lyrics and are asked to practice learning the songs. Here are two links to help the sing-a-long process:

"What A Wonderful World"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A3yCcXgbKrE

"Firework"

(This link features Ms. Fletcher on guitar.) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DdcmucgdvfU&feature=youtu.be

The students finished watching the DVD story of The Iron Giant. Each child used a Venn diagram to compare the book and the movie, looking at what parts of each story were the same and which parts were different. The class learned about opinion writing and began to write their opinions of the book and movie, remembering to use information from the stories to back up their opinions. The students also learned how to create his/her own "iron" man figure, using aluminum foil.

In math, the students learned about capacity (the amount an object can hold) and the standard units of litre (L) and millilitre (mL) as well as mass (the amount of "stuff" in an object) and the standard units of kilogram (kg) and gram (g). They all used the reference points of a litre bottle of water and a one kilogram bag of sugar to help them understand these standard units better.

The class went to see a play by The Dufflebag Theatre called "The Three Muskateers". In this very funny retelling of the classic story, many students from our school were actors in the play. Our own Haleigh was asked to play the role of "Constance"!

Ms. Fletcher helped the students work together to write a song this week. They used the tune of a song familiar to our class called "All Star" and work in partners to write new lyrics to show what they know about rocks and minerals. The song was a great success and a video of the students performing this song can be found at the end of this posting. The class said "good bye" to Ms. Fletcher this week as she will be at a different school next month. We all wish her the best of luck in her role as a teacher!

The students continued to learn more about the brain. We read a book that talked about what it means to be a genius and during our computer time, the children visited a website that has games that challenges you to use your brain differently:

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/braingames/braingames.htm

Books read aloud this week:

Train Your Brain To Be A Genius by John Woodward

Zero by Kathryn Otoshi