News for November 30

You Are Stardust - dioramas



News for November 30

The students worked hard to complete their Lego stories. These stories, based on the Lego buildings they created for our Lego City, will be typed and compiled into a class book for our classroom library. They also began to plan and write their personal comic strips.

In guided reading, the students examined the features of different kinds of poems by reading a few different ones. This is in preparation for our poetry unit.

The class finished their dioramas based on the book You Are Stardust. They drew and coloured the paper pieces based on their designs and glued them into place. Then they each wrote and art reflection on the project. The children reviewed the steps in creating the dioramas and made a video explaining the process. The video was sent to the author and illustrator to share the amazing work of the class. This video can be seen above.

In math, the students began the unit on multiplication. They thought about things that come in equal groups (for example, eggs come in groups of 12). They learned about arrays and how these are arrangements of objects in rows and columns. They played the game of Circles and Stars which is an introduction to the multiplicative concept of groups of same numbers of objects.

The students set up Lego City complete with roads and intersections. They began making maps of the city paying close attention to the N (always at the top of the map), S, E, W directions and the names of the streets.

Through read alouds and class discussions, the students have begun to look at the nature of snow and snowflakes both the art and science of these natural wonders.

Books read aloud this week:

365 Penguins by Jean-Luc Fromental (plus our advent calendar based on this book as we count down the days to our Winter Holidays.)
Cowboy Dreams by Dayal Kaur Khalsa
Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
Snowflakes in Photographs by W. A. Bentley
The Story of Snow by Mark Cassino

Learning American Sign Language With Room 5 - Episode 12