News for March 21

News for March 21

This week the class began the preparations for our annual 100 Books Party that is happening next Friday, March 28th.

The students began the week by learning about two holidays. Holi is a Hindu holiday celebrating colour and St. Patrick's Day is a Christian holiday celebrating the Irish saint, St. Patrick.

The students finished their book reports this week. They wrote out their good copies and prepared them for display at our 100 Books Party next week.

One of the traditions in Room 5 is to sew sock creatures. This week the students chose their socks and used the sewing machine to make the bodies, arms and tails. They also stuffed the bodies and hand sewed the stuffing openings closed.

Each student began to write a character profile for his/her sock creature. What is it's name? Does it have a job? What is it's favourite food?

The class began to learn cursive handwriting this week. It's important to learn how to create cursive letters in order to be ale to read cursive writing, to understand that cursive writing is faster than printing and to be able to sign his/her signature. This week, the students learned the letters a, d, g, c and q.

The students learned how to origami fold little paper books and used these little books to create party invitations for the Room 5 families and school staff. The children also started making bookmarks to give as a "loot bag" type of gift to our party guests next week.

In math,  children had a chance to apply learned math concepts to our study of our 100 books. Working in small groups, the students worked to put all the books in numerical order. Next they tallied which books were fiction and non-fiction and which were hardcover and softcover. Then they looked at the authors and tallied if they were male or female. Finally, they added up all the pages in all 100 books. We read aloud almost 4, 000 pages! The children also weighed the books, measured how tall the pile of books was and how long the books were when laid end-to-end. Did you know that the 100 books laid end-to-end is longer than 19 students laid end-to-end and is two and one half times taller than the school?

The guest on our Room 5 Interview Show this week was Pat, the chief caretaker for our school. This video can be found in a separate posting.

Books read aloud this week:

Infinity And Me  by Kate Hosford
Where Do You Look? - A book about homonyms by Marthe and Nell Jocelyn
Hinduism by Katherine Prior
St. Patrick's Day by Carmen Bredeson
The Lego Movie Handbook by Ace Landers (...because we LOVE Lego in Room 5!)
Brad The Wonder Baby by Di Bates (guided reading book)
Once Upon A Memory by Nina Laden
A Million Dots by Andrew Clements