News for February 22

News for February 22

It was another 4-day week in Room 5, but as usual, the students were very busy!

The children have made a lot of progress on the chapter book writing project. I met with each student to have a short one-to-one writing conference. In this conference, we reviewed the writing process (plan, rough copy, edit and revise) and practiced revising the first sentence of their work to see how to make their good writing even better. The students are each required to write 3 chapters of their story (based on their paintings). The good copy of these stories will be typewritten. The children also used the digital camera to take a photos of their paintings for the front cover of their chapter books.

The class continued to learn one lowercase cursive letter each day. This week the students learned the letters d, g, h and t.

In guided reading, the children began to talk about the features of fairy tales by reading the classic story, The Ugly Duckling by Hans Christian Andersen. (They also learned the name for a baby swan is a cygnet.)

In math, the students learned about mass and how to measure it using kilograms and grams. Each child had a chance to feel how heavy a one kilogram box of salt felt in their hands as well as a paperclip (with a mass of about one gram). The students reviewed the measurement concepts in the unit, time, money, temperature, capacity and mass. The class wrote the unit test on Friday.

The class began our social studies unit on Pioneers this week. One of our read aloud stories, Mary of Mile 18 illustrated a number of ways people live without modern conveniences. For example, fresh water in winter was obtained by bringing into the house, buckets of snow to melt. The students watched videos about building a pioneer home and about the features of an early pioneer village. The children also learned the song, "This Land" which talks about the hard work pioneers had to do when they first came to this land. Finally, the students had a chance to make a handmade toy. Using a button and some string, they each made a spinning button toy.

The children learned the true story of Christian, a lion that was kept as a pet, but then as it grew, his owners realized that his home was back in Africa. They took him there, but then revisited him a year later. They weren't sure that Christian would remember them, but he did. Here is a video of their reunion:

During our time in the computer lab, the students practiced their money skills by playing games at the following website:

www.practicalmoneyskills.ca/games/

Books read aloud this week:

Mary of Mile 18 by Ann Blades (read over 3 days)
Christian the Lion by Ace Bourke and John Rendall

The Room 5 Interview Show!

This week Harshitha and Layla interviewed Wendi, one of our sign language interpreters.