News for September 27

News for September 27

This week the students worked on creating "time capsule" books. The class discussed time capsules and how they are a way to capture a moment in time, to be looked back on sometime in the future. Each student traced his/her hand (and foot!), measured and recorded his/her height and weight and wrote down their wishes. After taping in a small treasure (a shiny Canadian quarter), each child created a front cover and had his/her photo taken. These little books will be packed away and not opened until the last week of school (almost 10 months from now).

Our class pets arrived this week! We now have two fish in our aquarium. A red and white fantail goldfish (named Alpha) and a black moor goldfish (named Beta) plus two mystery snails (named George I and George II). The students were so excited! The children then took the information from a class writing planner and wrote their first non-fiction stories of the school year. This time the students wrote a rough copy, did a self-edit, did an edit with the teacher and finally wrote a good copy incorporating the changes and corrections to their writing. The class also created pictures of the aquarium. At the end of the week, the children each created a poster that included the good copy of their writing and the aquarium art they created. These projects are now on display in the hallway outside of our classroom.

In math, the class began the unit on place value by discovering that the same two digits, arranged differently have very different values. For example, "19" is very different from "91". Because the value of the digit depends on the place that you put it! The students did activities to help them understand the basics of the design of our number system and ended the week by reviewing the use of  place value blocks.

We started making our pillows this week! The first step was to create one side of the pillow by tie dying fabric. Each child twisted, folded and rolled the fabric to make places where the dye couldn't get  in and held the twists and turns in place with elastics and clothes pins. After putting the fabric in the bucket with blue dye powder, water, salt (to help keep the dye from washing out) and hot water (as a catalyst to speed up the time it takes to dye the fabric), and waiting 30 minutes, finally Ms. R put on rubber gloves and took out the hot, blue bundles of fabric.

The class began a unit on the basics of making comics/cartoons. After learning about how comics are different from other types of storytelling, mostly because the story is told in "speech bubbles". The children had a chance to write their own speech bubbles for a picture of a dog in a classroom. The results were very funny when the children shared aloud what they thought the dog was thinking.

The children had a chance to read a play about the Three Little Pigs. This is a Reader's Theatre activity where the students learn about the text features of a script and practice their reading fluency by reading the script several times, by reading altogether then by reading the different character parts.

Books read aloud this week:

Fish Out of Water by Helen Palmer
Fish is Fish by Leo Lionni
Swimmy by Leo Lionni
Bugs by the Numbers by