News for May 9

News for May 9

This week the students worked hard to create and wrap original necklace designs as gifts for Mother's Day. Also...the caterpillars arrived for our science project!

The students created a movie about the countries they studied for their social studies projects. They sang the song "Everywhere Man" with the names of the countries as part of the lyrics and were filmed saying cool facts about the countries they studied. This video can be seen at the end of this posting.

The students finished their stories based on what happened before the movie (prequel), A Grand Day Out or after the movie (sequel). These stories will be typed up this week.

In math, the students learned about how to use direction words (for example, left/right, north/south) to move along a surface. The children also learned how to recognize symmetry and how to use a "mira" to help decide if an image is symmetrical.

In science, the students began to talk about movement as a beginning to understanding simple machines. We read about all the different ways objects move (for example, rolling and sliding). The students made a simple button toy and we discussed all the different ways that it could move, especially, spin and vibrate! We also read a non-fiction story about how the simple machine called an "inclined plane" makes moving things (and people) up and down, easier.

On Tuesday morning, our class took part in the Primary Track & Field event. The children did many events like, 200 metre run and long jump. Everyone tried their best and showed good sportsmanship.

Our caterpillars arrived this week. These caterpillars will turn into Painted Lady butterflies in a few weeks. The students measured how long they were, drew pictures of what they looked like and most importantly, they wrote down the questions they had about these small creatures. The students record their observations in small science notebooks that each child made. We use these questions to guide our research. So far the caterpillars have grown from about 1 cm to about 2 cm. The job of a caterpillar is to eat a lot and to try not to get eaten by a predator. We learned that the light brown spheres are called "frass" and are actually caterpillar poop. The small black bits are actually the caterpillars skin and exoskeleton that it sheds (like pulling off a sock) as it grows. The web-like stuff over the caterpillar is sticky and is used to protect it.

Speed Stacking is getting even better in Room 5 because Ms. Farrelly and Ms. Schneider visited our classroom and gave us brand new cups and timing mats! We record the times on chart paper and after practicing the students will get timed again to see how much they improved.

Books read aloud this week:

Willow Finds a Way by Lana Button (The students of our school voted this the winner of the Blue Spruce Award for children's fiction.)

If You Hold a Seed by Elly Mackay

A Lion in Paris by Beatrice Alemagna

Caterpillars to Butterflies by Camilla de la Bedoyere

Gravity All Around by David Conrad

Our Countries Video!