On Friday, the class celebrated the 100 days of school. The students counted and recorded the number of exercises (for example, jumping jacks) that they could do in 100 seconds (or 1 minute and 40 seconds). They drew and stamped 100 images in the squares of a 100's chart. They counted out 100 fruit loop cereal pieces and threaded them on a string. Finally, they arranged groups of 100 things (for example, pennies and straws) into arrays of 100. They also heard the story of "The 100 Shirts of Mr. Lee", a book that tells the true story of the teacher Mr. Lee and how he wore a different crazy shirt to school every day.
In math, we continued the unit on measurement by reviewing the features of Canadian coins. Of we also talked about how the Canadian penny is no longer made and over the next 5 years will eventually be phased out. Did you know there are over 6 billion pennies in Canada? That's over $60 million, just in pennies! The students learned how to count money, how to correctly write money amounts in dollars and cents and how to make change. Students wrote about the history of the penny and why Canada is choosing to not use the penny anymore.
We were very fortunate to have Darryl, a caretaker at our school, lend us a huge Canadian flag for Canadian Flag Day (on February 15th). It measures 1 m and 43 cm by 2 m and 64 cm! It's now on display in the stairwell by our classroom by our country projects.
In writing, the class had a serious discussion about how things change in February regarding their writing. It is now expected that they independently edit their work to correct changes in, for example, punctuation, before handing their work in. The students reviewed what is meant by revising their work (simply put, it means making their good writing even better). The children practiced by making some very boring sentences more interesting.
We finished the read aloud book, Stone Fox, and despite its very sad ending, we managed to discuss how the words in books can be very powerful. The students each wrote a reflection on what they thought about this story with the ending that they won't forget (and made their teacher cry as she read the final chapter).
In guided reading, the small reading groups each learned about the Underground Railroad and how families in the US and Canada helped slaves travel to freedom in Canada.
The class learned about the artist Henri Matisse and how in his later years, he started "drawing with scissors" by making collage art. The students used what they know about the technique of collage to create collages using old book covers. They painted large pieces of cardboard and glued images, letters and shapes cut out from the book covers. These are now on display in our classroom.
The children had a chance to use and read glass thermometers by measuring the temperature of the air in the room, tap water, ice water and hot water. Then the students wrote a reflection about the experiment, writing about what surprised them, what didn't surprise them and suggestions as to what other temperature experiments that they would like to do.
Books read aloud this week:
Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner (chapter book)
Henri Matisse - Drawing With Scissors by Keesia Johnson
Canadian Money by Elizabeth MacLeod
The 100 Shirts of Mr. Lee by Nancy Rawlinson
The children had a chance to learn more about a song they often hear when working on their art. The video of this song was made using 288,000 jelly beans! Here is the video:
The class learned about the history of Groundhog Day (February 2):
The Room 5 Interview Show! This week Mackenzie and Yamin interviewed Kelly, one of our Sign Language Interpreters.
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