The students finished writing and illustrating the biography of the Canadian author/illustrator, Dayal Kaur Khalsa. Each student presented a researched fact on her life, an opinion essay on his/her favourite book written by Dayal Kaur Khalsa and an oil pastel artwork of a scene from one of her books. All this information is now in a binder and is officially the second class community book of Room 5!
A friend of mine from the Canadian Children's Book Centre, Gillian O'Reilly, asked our class to read and review the new math picture book, Counting on Fall by Lizann Flatt. We read the book together and talked about it. We then talked about opinion and how everyone may feel differently about something but the important part is to communicate why. Then the students wrote letters to Gillian expressing their opinions about the book's story and illustrations. These letters will be sent to Gillian and hopefully, the class will get a letter back from her.
In our guided reading groups this week, all students read about the structures made by humans and animals and the types of materials humans use to make strong and stable structures.
The children worked in pairs to participate in the Room 5 Structure Challenge! Using only 15 sheets of paper and masking tape they created structures that had to be around 30 cm high and hold as many books as possible. Students had to apply what they know to create a successful structure. (Remember the power of the triangle!) Everyone did a great job but the winners were Marina and Sauyma. Their structure held 31 books, beating the previous class record of 25 books!
In math, the students finished up our unit on word problems by completing a very tricky word problem with more than one answer. Working with a partner, they had "two brains and four hands" to find all the solutions. The children presented their answers on large paper and these final solutions are now on display on the bulletin board outside our classroom. Later in the week, the class reviewed different addition strategies. Using double facts (e.g., 4+4=8) and 10-facts can help speed up answering addition questions.
In computers, the students explored the Lego website at http://www.lego.com/ .
The students worked very hard to learn how to spell and use the tricky homophones there/their/they're. One strategy is to remember the sentence, "They're with their friends over there."
The class showed an interest in the tallest building in the world so they watched a video of the top ten tallest buildings in the world:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tx_jYEV34k
Books read aloud this week:
Counting on Fall by Lizann Flatt
Amazing Buildings by Kate Hayden
From Mud Huts to Skyscrapers - An architecture book for children by Christine Paxmann
The Little Red Pen by Janet Stevens
Learning American Sign Language With Room 5 - Episode 5
No comments:
Post a Comment