News for November 4

News for November 4

There was a lot going on this week from celebrating Halloween to learning about the Mexican holiday "Dia De Los Muertos" or The Day of the Dead to learning about parallel lines and right angles to sewing art journals! Whew!

We began the week by learning about and celebrating All Hallow's Eve or Halloween. The students learned how to make caramel apples, did various holiday crafts and listened to a "ghost story". They even solved a math challenge to figure out how many caramels we needed to use to make the caramel apples. In the afternoon, we put on costumes and walked, with the rest of the school, in a Halloween Parade around the neighbourhood. At the end of the day, the class enjoyed their homemade caramel apples while watching a dvd of Domo's adventures.

In writing, the children reviewed the steps to make their pillows. First, as a group, we talked about all the things the class had to learn how to do to create a finished pillow. Next, the students wrote directions, with enough details, to show another person how to make a pillow. Writing these type of directions is called "procedural writing" and is a type of non-fiction writing that helps children write more information into their sentences, as well as, practising writing information in a sequence. These directions will be made into "How to" books next week.

In math, the students learned how to identify pairs of parallel lines and how to spot them in polygons. We also talked about angles (the distance between two adjacent lines attached at one end). The three types we discussed are right angles (where a horizontal line meets a vertical line), angles smaller than a right angle (acute angles) and angles bigger than a right angle (obtuse angles). The class also discovered that as more sides and angles are added to a polygon, the more the shape looks like a circle. Mathematicians consider that circles have have 0 sides, 0 vertices and 0 angles (since they have an infinite number of sides/angles/vertices). The class also started to learn how to sort two-dimensional shapes by their attributes (for example, if a shape has a right angle or not).

In science, the navy bean seeds have sprouted both roots and leaves. The children recorded their observations each day in their science folders. At the end of the week, the students planted half of their sprouted seeds in soil and left half on the damp paper to see the importance of soil to the health of plants. The children learned about the life cycle of plants and trees and drew the life cycle of the navy bean in their science folders.

In social studies, the class began to learn more about Canada. They learned a song to help them remember the names and the order of the provinces and territories, from east to west. They labelled and coloured maps of Canada and learned some important facts about our country. Did you know that Canada is 149 years old and became a country on July 1, 1867? 

Every child now has a homemade art journal! They created designs on the covers and learned how to sew the pages inside. These journals will now be used by the children during their choice times.

Finally, on Friday, Lucia's mother came in to talk about the Mexican holiday, "Dia De Los Muertos" or "The Day of the Dead". This is a holiday that their family observes to celebrate the lives of family members that have passed away. Lucia read aloud a book that talked about traditions of this day. She showed photographs of what people do to celebrate this holiday. We even had some Mexican hot chocolate and "pan de los muertos", which is a special bread baked only at this time of year. Thanks so much Lucia for taking the time to come and share this information with our class!

Books read aloud this week:

The Tailypo - A Ghost Story by Joan Galdsone

The Greedy Triangle by Marilyn Burns

The 100 Dresses by Eleanor Estes (chapter book)

Dia De Los Muertos by Roseanne Greenfield Thong