Well this week started out with lots of snow! On Monday, we were a class of only 7 students but we still had fun and the students enjoyed hot chocolate while playing a cooperative writing game.
In math, the students continued the unit on time and practiced telling analog and digital time and calculating elapsed time.
In science, the students did a lot of reading and experiments to investigate friction, static electricity and other forces. They watched a Magic Schoolbus DVD about what would happen in a frictionless baseball game. They experimented with balloons to investigate static electricity and participated in friction races using folded cardboard and then, balloon powered CD's!
On Wednesday, the students started to learn more about Canada's Flag. On Sunday, February 15th, our flag will turn 50 years old. Each day on the school's morning announcements, a team of students from our class read some facts about the flag. Did you know that flag's birth year was 1965 and members of Parliament argued until 2:00 AM in the morning until they finally voted for our current flag design? The students will continue these announcement next week.
The class finally heard the exciting ending of our read aloud chapter book, Stone Fox. It was a very powerful scene at the end of the race and even though I've read this book aloud to students for years, I still have to read the last few pages through my tears. We had a great discussion about the power of words to make us feel strong emotions.
The writing challenge this week, was for the children to each write a first person narrative. That means a story from the perspective of the main character of a story. The challenge was to write a story from the perspective of the pencil each student uses everyday. The children had to think about what the pencil might like about its job, what it doesn't like about its job and what it dreams of doing one day. The students wrote their good copies of their edited stories on pieces of long, narrow paper and they attached their stories to the pencils. These stories are now on display on the bulletin board in the hall outside of our classroom.
On Friday, the students celebrated 100 days of school together in Room 5! They worked in groups to try different 100-based activities: counting out and stringing 100 Fruit Loop cereal pieces, stamping out 100 designs, completing a large 100 chart, creating designs with groups of 100 objects and counting how many exercises (like jumping jacks) they could do in 100 seconds. It was a lot of fun!
Here is a video from 2009 showing the first 50 crazy shirts of Mr. Lee:
Books read aloud this week:
Stone Fox (chapter book - finished) by John Reynolds Gardiner
Groundhog Day by Clara Cella
The Secret Pizza Party by Adam Rubin
Our Flag: The Story of Canada's Maple Leaf by Ann Maureen Owens
The 100 Shirts of Mr. Lee by Nancy Rawlinson and the class of 2008-2009
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