News for November 8

News for November 8

Our Amaryllis plant is growing!  The students are excited about our daily “Amaryllis Update”.  Each day, the Student of the Day gets to measure and chart the growth of our amaryllis plant.  It is now over 3.5 cm tall.  

This week, the students began the unit on linear measurement in math.  The students explored non-standard units of measure, such as measuring with cubes and straws.  Students became skilled at estimating, measuring and recording with non-standard units of measure through measuring their height and the length of their legs, hands and thumbs.  

Towards the end of the week, the students started to learn more about standard units of measure, starting with the  centimetre. The students wondered about the height of our school and if it could be measured. To answer this question, the class wrote a letter to the school’s head caretaker, Pat.  He visited our class on Friday and said he would be happy to help us with this project. The students will work with Pat next week to actually measure the height of the school. 

Over the past week, Room 5 has been busy listening to, talking about and writing poems as part of our poetry unit. Many poems were read aloud to the class and the students even got a chance to listen to a recording of the poet, Michael Rosen reading some of his poems. The children thought carefully about how poets choose words to help the reader create images in his/her mind. The students wrote “acrostic” poems (ones in which the first letter of each line spells out a particular word) including one about their favourite food.  These poems were so descriptive that we got hungry just reading them!

We also talked about trees this week -- actual trees and family trees.  As part of our social studies unit on “Changing Family and Community Traditions”, the students have started to create their own family trees, pulling together some of the  research they have done on their families and their traditions.  

The students talked a lot about Remembrance Day this week. The children learned about the symbols for peace (peace signs, poppies, white doves, paper cranes) and the reason why Canada observes Remembrance Day on November 11th. (The reason is that the end of World War I took effect at the 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month of that year, November 11, 1918.) The children practiced the Remembrance Day song they learned last week. They cut out the large poppies they painted last week and even learned how to fold an origami paper (peace) crane. Each student folded two cranes, one to keep and one to send to the Hiroshima Peace Project in Japan. Some children also got a chance to work with a partner to fold really big paper cranes use large pieces of paper. These painted poppies and large paper cranes will be used to decorate the gym for the Remembrance Day assembly next Monday.

Finally the children wrote 33 words about what peace means to them. The number 33 was picked because 11 + 11+ 11 = 33, using the symbolic number of 11 from the time and date we observe Remembrance Day. The class made a video of all the peace activities we did this week, including each student reading aloud her/his peace message. (This video will be posted in a separate blog posting).

Books read aloud this week:   

Length by Henry Arthur Pluckrose 

A Poke in the I by Paul B. Janeczko and Chris Raschka

The Peace Book by Todd Parr

Sadako (And the Thousand Paper Cranes) by Eleanor Coerr

Where Poppies Grow by Linda Granfield