News for November 13

News for November 13

The highlight of this 4-day week was when our class observed Remembrance Day by attending a school assembly and creating a video of the students' peace messages:

In math, the students continued to practice three-digit addition and subtraction with and without regrouping. They also practiced solving word problems. At the end of the week, the class started the geometry unit by reviewing two-dimensional (2D) shape features (sides, corners, angles) and names. They also discovered that for any 2D shape, the number of sides equals the numbers of vertices and equals the number of angles.

In science, we talked about the different structures that animals make (for example, bird nests, beaver dams). The students even had a chance to see and taste honey from a real honeycomb.

The class learned about the life and work of the Spanish architect, Antoni Gaudi. Despite many challenges, Gaudi designed and created unique buildings reflecting his love of nature (and distaste for straight lines). It's difficult to believe that these unusual, modern-looking buildings were made over 100 years ago.

The students worked in pairs to complete the newspaper challenge. The class was challenged to create strong and stable structures that are at least 20 cm tall and will hold a stack of books using only newspapers and masking tape.

The class continued to practice identifying and using nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs. The children learned how to use these words to play the game "Mad Libs" to create some very silly stories.

The students worked really hard to finish their research posters this week. They took the facts from their research sheets and wrote the facts into sentences to write on the posters. They added photos and maps and reviewed their work to make sure everything was complete. That is, all information was included on the poster and sentences were written correctly.

Finally, the students graphed the heights of their research structures to compare them. The structures that we researched ranged from 8 m tall (The Great Wall of China) to 830 m (Burj Khalifa)! Did you know that the Burj Khalifa is the tallest building in the world and is about the same height as two Empire State Buildings and three Eiffel Towers?

Books read aloud this week:

The Honeybee Man by Lela Nargi
Building on Nature - The Life of Antoni Gaudi by Rachel Victoria Rodriguez
The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns