News for January 21

News for January 21

There was a lot going during this four-day week in Room 204!

First, our amaryllis plant is now 64 cm tall! The bud started to split open and we could see inside at least three flower blooms!

The class started to talk about poetry this week. Poetry is fun to write because the regular rules of writing can be broken. We looked at two poetry forms concrete or shape poems and list poems. The students practiced writing concrete poems by using and placing words into the shape of the topic of the poem. For example, a concrete poem about the CN Tower has the words placed in the shape of the tower. The children also wrote a list poem and a special kind of list poem called an acrostic poem.

The class read aloud, together, the ancient Sanskrit poem called "Salutation to the Dawn". It's a poem that reminds us to live every day in a happy, productive way. The students are learning to say this poem from memory. To help them do this, each student took responsibility to create a colourful poster of one line of the poem. These will be posted around our classroom to help the children learn this poem.

Each child wrote a letter to an author this week. Every student read a different glovetopus chapter book, then wrote a letter to the student author stating what they liked about the story, what they could do to improve next time and a question for the author about the story. The finished books and letters are all now part of a class book.

The cursive letters learned this week were: u, w, y and t.

In math, the children learned about capacity (how much a container can hold), and the metric units used to measure capacity, litre and millilitre. Later in the week we talked about thermometers and temperature measured in degrees Celsius.

In science, the class continued to talk about solids and liquids. This week we focused on water. The students reviewed the simplified scientific method and used this approach to set up an experiment to use thermometers to measure hot and cold water (and temperatures in-between). This year, we've often discussed the key temperatures of water, 0 degrees Celsius (liquid water turns into solid ice) and 100 degrees Celsius (liquid water turns into gaseous water vapour). This experiment actually proved to the students that when you add ice to water the temperature on the thermometer goes down and adding hot water makes the temperature go up. Also, these temperature changes, as the children saw on the thermometers, happen very fast!

Finally, on Thursday Room 204 had some visitors from the parent council, reminding our class on the proper technique of hand washing, to help prevent the spread of germs.

Books read aloud this week:

Stone Fox by James Reynolds Gardiner (chapter book, continued)

Book group chapter books: Dog Star, Duck Down, Authur's Poetry Contest, The Elevator Duck