News for March 27

News for March 27

It was wonderful to welcome back everyone after March Break! The students got right back to work and began a number of new projects.

In math, the class began the unit on fractions. Fractions can be difficult for many children so we spent the week concentrating on understanding two basic concepts. The first is that fractions are EQUAL parts of a whole. The second is that the size of a fraction depends on the size of the whole that you are considering. For example, if I want to have a big dessert, would I choose half a M & M candy or half of a cake? They are both halves, but the cake is much, much bigger. So half of the cake would be much bigger. The students drew shapes, folded paper strips and played with pizza slices to help with their understanding.

In writing, the students learned how to use quotation marks in their writing to show which words are spoken by a character. We also talked about the difference between editing written work (correcting mistakes) and revising (adding words to make good sentences even better). The children used these strategies to work on their sock creature stories.

The class began to talk about fairy tales this week. First we listed the fairy tales that the class already knew and then we read aloud different kinds of fairy tales. We started to gather up the ideas that make a fairy tale different from other types of narratives (stories). One thing the students noticed was that often fairy tales have royalty in them (kings, queens, princesses and princes), but not always.

In art, the students learned about background, mid-ground and foreground when looking at art and when making art. Using the tissue collage backgrounds they had created previously, the children drew characters and cut them out and glued them on layers of cardboard to show mid-ground and foreground.

The class began the new social studies unit on the people in Canada from 1780-1850. We did a few choral readings of non-fiction stories about how people lived before Canada became a country. We had some very interesting discussions. Did you know that during that time, most immigrants to our county came from Ireland, Scotland and England?

The children did an EQAO-style reading comprehension activity by reading the short story, Once Upon a Time and writing answers questions based on the story. It is important that students have a lot of practice doing these types of activities before the actual EQAO test at the end of May.

The students each got a little cursive writing booklet called A Buggy Alphabet to practice forming their lower- and uppercase cursive letters.

Finally, at the end of the week, the children separated into two groups and began to read the script for a new play, Oregon, Here We Come! Although this is a story based on an American pioneer experience, many of the details of daily life are the same for the same time period. The class will work on making props etc. for the play which will be videotaped and posted soon.

Books read aloud this week:

The Fairy Tale Princess - Seven Classic Stories From the Enchanted Forest by Su Blackwell
The Emperor's New Clothes by Hans Christian Anderson
Goldilocks and the Three Bears - A Tale Moderne by Steven Guarnaccia
Goldilocks and Just One Bear by Leigh Hodgkinson