News for January 22

News for January 22

This four-day week started off with something very exciting! We got 2 new water snails for our aquarium. The students used their survey skills to decide on the names for the snails. Mr. Gold and Stripey were the most popular names. The snails seem to be getting along fine so far with our two African Clawed Frogs, Mr. and Mrs. Pickles.

In math, we continued to practice the 10 tricky multiplication facts every day. The children have made a lot of progress and we will now move to a once a week practice of these math facts. In the Data Management unit, the students learned how to read and create pictographs and circle graphs and reviewed how to read and create bar graphs (vertical and horizontal).

The students finished their  3D art and the fiction stories they wrote based on their art. These stories will be typed and made into books. For the covers of these books, each child set up and took a photo of his/her sculpture. The class also took the time to write a reflection on creating their 3D art sculptures.

In Social Studies, the students finished up the unit by reading a last summary article on Ontario facts and practiced using yellow highlighters to focus on important information. For the final activity, the students are researching key topics about living and working in Ontario and have started to create large posters to communicate what they have learned.

In science we talked about forces (push or pull) and focused on the force of gravity. (It's considered a pulling force.) Gravity helps us stay on the ground and helps the earth stay in its orbit around the sun. It's a very important concept! The children also read a non-fiction story about the life of Sir Isaac Newton (1642-1727), the English scientist that first described universal gravity.

The students received the "dinosaur fossils" they made last week and letters from their friends in Mr. Grundy and Ms. Standing's kindergarten class. Our class wrote thank you notes to their learning buddies thanking them for teaching them how to make salt dough "fossils".

During our weekly computer time the students continued to explore keyboarding games to help them learn how to type on the QWERTY keyboard efficiently. This is the site they visited:

www.tvokids.com/games/keyboardclimber

Books read aloud this week:

Stone Fox (chapter book) by John Reynolds Gardiner