News for March 11

News for March 11

This week the students did a range of activities from filming their sock monkey movies, to reviewing parts of speech, to learning how to play Chinese Checkers (in the dark...), plus much more!

The children reviewed the parts of speech required to be understood for grades 2 and 3. They practised finding these kinds of words in sentences. Then they used what they know to create a word flip puzzle. This puzzle puts nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs in the same places on a piece of paper and the words can be exchanged to create correct but crazy sentences (for example, "The blue donut ran quietly.").

In science, the class began to discuss the air and water in our environment. They looked at the places water is found on earth (e.g., rivers, clouds). We also started to talk about how to keep our air and water clean, because humans can't make more air or water so we need to take care of the air and water that we have.

In math, the students learned more about surveys and graphing. Each day the students answer a survey question and we discuss the results. This week we focused on pictographs and bar graphs. A the end of the week the students wrote their own survey questions to ask the class and everyone answered each other's survey questions, tallied and graphed the results.

After hearing and discussing the read aloud books, The King's Chessboard and A Grain of RIce, the class figured out our calendar pattern for this month. Starting with one, each day the number is doubled. At first, this does not seems so interesting, 1, 2, 4, 8....but then the numbers start to get very big, 256, 512, 1024...This pattern was featured in the ancient Indian folktale read aloud books we talked about and they illustrate the power of doubling! 

On Friday, our school observed Earth Hour by turning off all electric lights and devices from 2:00 to 3:00 pm. Our classroom is quite dark when the lights are off. However, the students learned about the board game, "Chinese Checkers". Did you know that it's not Chinese at all? It was invented in 1892, 124 years ago in Germany. After learning how to set up the board and the simple rules of the game, the children played their first game of Chinese Checkers in their table groups.

The students learned the history and traditions of Saint Patrick's Day. It is observed on March 17th each year and it is a national holiday in Ireland. This day is celebrated with parades and wearing the colour green and shamrocks (young clover with three leaves).

The students are learning the American Sign Language (ASL) alphabet. ASL is an active language with no written component. ASL is not simply signed English. There are separate signs for words and a unique word order. However, it is useful to know the ASL alphabet to be able to fingerspell English words. This week, the children learned the signs for the letters A to N.

The Room 204 Interview Show had Ms. Robson as our guest this week. She is a teacher from Australia who is visiting and teaching in the classroom across the hall from our class this year. This video can be seen in a separate posting.

The Room 204 Sock Monkey Theatre presents...The 2016 Sock Monkey movies! Six different film crews of students created and filmed six movies this week. These movies can be seen in separate postings.

On Thursday, at 2:30 our class participated in "The Big Crunch" when students in our school and across Canada all bit into apples at the same time. This event reminds us to make healthy food choices.

Books read aloud this week:

Saint Patrick's Day by Molly Aloian

The Great Paper Caper by Oliver Jeffers

American Sign Language by Remy Charlip

The King's Chessboard retold by David Birch

A Grain of Rice by Demi