This week our school had some sad news about our school office administrator, Norah. Norah will be leaving our school to work at another job. Our class had a great opportunity to make her feel special by creating beautiful tissue paper flowers to make a special crown and throne for her good bye ceremony at an assembly on Friday. She loved her hat!
The children used the story planner drawings that they created last week to write fiction stories. The goal was to write a story that contained information in their art. For example, if a grey cat was in the picture then the student should write that the cat was grey in his/her
story. This approach to story writing helps the students include more details in their written work. These stories are now typed and will be displayed in the classroom along with the pictures that inspired the stories.
In math, the class continued the unit on patterning by looking at repeating patterns with two attributes changing. Then the class focused on learning about increasing (or growing) patterns. The key concepts with these types of patterns is to look at the pattern rule to determine what one has to do to the last term in the pattern to get the next term. For example, 2,4,6, _, the next term is 8 and the pattern rule is add 2 (or +2 or skip counting by two's). The class also worked in pairs to make an increasing pattern connection to our read aloud book, Six Dinner Sid to try and figure out how many dinners Sid the cat ate in one week.
In science, the students read more facts about snails. They also learned how to make a diagram and how a diagram is different from an art drawing. Diagrams are pictures that show true information and have labels in the form of arrows and words. The students learned how to draw a snail diagram showing the parts of a snail. Each child then took a snail fact and wrote it on a page with a snail diagram to create our class book of snail facts.
The class learned how to make plaster of Paris cast sculptures. The children each made imprints of snail shell spiral patterns into plasticine. Then plaster of Paris (a mineral called gypsum) was mixed with water and poured on top. When it dried, the plaster sculpture showed the patterns and designs of the snail shells. The students then wrote about the project in their writing journals.
The students created more comics this week. They learned how to write "narrative boxes" (usually at the top of a panel) to give more information about the story, like a narrator would do. They also learned how to make sound bubbles to add sound effects to their stories. The children are now working on a new four-panel comic strip with an emphasis on the story having a title panel, a beginning, middle and end panel to go with a three part story format.
In guided reading this week, the students read the first half of a chapter book, The Sea Dog. The goals for this week and next week is to discuss how the author uses words in the story and the illustrator uses details in the pictures to give information that isn't obvious. For example, by answering the question, "Why did the boy not want to learn how to swim?", the students can say that he was scared of the ocean but must explain how they knew that. (One piece of evidence was that the boy knew that sometimes the sea was so strong that it broke big ships into little pieces.)
Books read aloud this week:
The Circus Ship by Chris Van Dusen
Six Dinner Sid by Inga Moore
Binky the Space Cat by Ashely Spires
Pattern by Henry Pluckrose
Follow the Line Through the House by Laura Ljungkvist
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