News for January 26

News for January 26

It was only a four-day week but there was a lot going on in Room 5.

For the third episode of our class TV show, Dalton and Oleseh interviewed Ms. Johnson, the music/drama/dance teacher for our class. The video of this interview can be found at the end of this posting.

On Monday, we celebrated Chinese New Year by cooking rice and vegetables, drinking green tea and using chopsticks. In the afternoon, the children learned about Chinese brush painting and painted bamboo and plum blossoms.

The students continued the unit on poetry. This week we focused on how poems often break the rules of proper writing. We learned about "acrostic" poems (where the lines begin with the letters of a chosen word) and the students wrote this type of poem using their names and other chosen words. We read a book about a type of poetry that generates words using only the letters in a chosen word for example, "friends...fred finds ed" (for once, no capitals on proper nouns is allowed!) The students also learned about "diamante" poems. These poems are written in the shape of a diamond and use a very specific number and type of word on each line. The class wrote their own diamante poems then went to the computer lab and used a program to help them.

Here is the site to generate your own "diamante poem": http://www.readwritethink.org/files/resources/interactives/diamante/

In math, the children finished up the geometry unit by reviewing the attributes of 3D figures (edges, vertices, faces) and finding different ways to sort them. They learned how to fold paper circles into different 2D shapes and then used the folded circles into 3D tetrahedrons (or triangle based pyramids). Then they used these to create flexible sculptures.

The class also learned more about the doubling pattern that we are making on our calendar. The pattern starts off, 1,2,4,8,16 etc but on Friday we are now at 6-digit numbers. Doubling is very powerful! We read an Indian folktale about how a young woman used this strategy to trick a king. We also watched a video about a story that used this strategy as well. The link to this video can be seen near the end of this posting.

In science, the students began the unit on strong and stable structures by investigating what it means for a structure to be strong and what it means to be stable. The children also learned the basics about how gears work and created gear trains using bottle caps.

The students continue to be fascinated by facts about space so during our computer time they visited a site with games and other information.

Here is the site with astronomy games for children: http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/astronomy.html

In the library photo above, Ms. Mantello, our school librarian and core French teacher is showing the class the nominated books for the Toronto Silver Birch Book Awards.

Video based on the power of doubling numbers, "The Legend of the Chessboard": http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t3d0Y-JpRRg

Books read aloud this week:

A Grain of Rice by Demi

Lemonade and Other Poems Squeezed From A Single Word by Bob Raczka

Won Ton - A Cat Tale Told in Haiku by Lee Wardlaw

We learned about Canada's first man in space (of course it wasn't a real human, but a Lego man!) Here is the

Lego Man In Space video:

The Room 5 Interview Show!

This week, Ms. Johnson was interviewed by Dalton and Oleseh.