News for October 14

News for October 14

The students were very busy, as usual, during this four-day week.

In math, the students learned how to use place value blocks to represent numbers. They answered place value riddles (for example, "Which number has four groups of ten and nine ones?") They reviewed how to easily add and subtract 10 from a number. Also they used place value blocks to play "Race to 100 (or zero)" to simultaneously represent numbers on the 100 chart and as place value representations. This concept is integral to understanding how the basic addition and subtraction algorithm works for multi-digit numbers.

The children learned about dice by making their own (for the weekly homework assignment this week). Did you know that the top face and bottom face always add up to seven? Dice can also have a pattern of dots or cardinal numbers to represent the 6 numbers on each die.

The class learned about how humans like to sort words into groups (also known as "parts of speech"). This week we focused on nouns and adjectives. A noun is a person, place or thing and there are two types: common nouns and proper nouns. An adjective is a word that gives more information about a noun. Did you know that if you remove all the adjectives from a formal sentence, it usually makes sense? (For example, The boy saw a cat. OR The small boy saw an orange cat.) So, adjectives aren't really necessary, but they give more information to sentences and makes writing more interesting to read.

To practice using adjectives, the children read, "The Boring Story" where the only adjective used  was the word "boring". The students got the message that using different adjectives makes writing more interesting and then had a chance to write in some adjectives of their choice.

The students were part of a writing experiment. Each child was given a story that I wrote about the class. However, in the first version, there were no capital letters, periods or spaces between words. It was almost impossible to read! Then they read a version that had spaces between words but no capitals or periods. The children realized the importance of using capitals and periods when writing in English, so that it is easy to read. Then the students had the job of "correcting" all the mistakes...

The class practiced how to correctly answer reading comprehension questions after reading a text. Reading comprehension is basically a test of the reader's understanding of a text. Answers are required to be in the form of a sentence, which is very difficult for many students. The text this week was a non-fiction story about hippos.

The children created "time capsules". They learned that people often create time capsules to collect information about what is happening now and seal it up to be opened at a later date. Usually these time capsules are placed in the foundations of new buildings. Our time capsules collected information about each child. The students made small books and in these books they recorded their height weight, the size of one hand and one foot. They wrote down their wishes and predictions and even got a "lucky" nickel. After taping in photos of themselves and making front and back covers, each child put his or her time capsule book into a box. As a class, we wrote a letter to "the future Room 204" and put it in the box too. It's a Room 204 tradition to put our "Flash Domo" stuffy into the box too. We sealed it all up and will not look at it until June 30, 2017!

In science, the children created a video highlighting cool facts from each of their research posters. The class also listened to, and discussed several different read aloud books about real animals that help to understand how animals interact with humans and each other.

In art, the class discussed colours! We reviewed the primary colours, blue, red and yellow and learned about the secondary colours created by mixing the primary colours. The students experienced this first-hand by mixing primary colours of playdoh to make green, orange and purple. Then they experimented by mixing a colour with white (to create a "tint") or with black (to create a "shade"). Then they mixed a bit of blue, red and yellow together, but soon realized this makes a muddy, grey/green/brown colour. Finally the children put the colours on a standard "colour wheel" and wrote down some colour addition sentences (for example, blue + red = purple).

The children created the designs for the second piece of fabric for their pillows. After drawing a design on white fabric using a permanent Sharpie marker, the students added colour by painting their pieces of fabric with acrylic paint.

On Friday, the children participated in the annual Terry Fox Run at our school. We talked about who Terry Fox was, why he is considered to be a Canadian hero and how the money we collect is used for cancer research. Did you know that Terry Fox received an Order of Canada medal? The class counted the money in our Terry Fox collection jar and we collected $71.95 for cancer research. Thanks Room 204!

Books read aloud this week:

Bob to the Rescue - A Street Cat Named Bob Adventure by James Bowen

Christian the Lion: A True Story by Anthony (Ace) Bourke and John Randall

Terry Fox by Douglas Coupland

Owen and Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship. By Isabella and Craig Hatkoff