News for December 16

News for December 16, 2016

This week, the children were very busy, as usual, learning about telling time on analog clocks, writing about science experiments and even reading about how the "sandwich" got its name. (Did you know that it was named after an English gentleman, John Montagu, The 4th Earl of Sandwich? Sandwich is the name of a town in England.)

In math, the children reviewed the units that humans use to measure time. The day and the year are based on science facts. A "day" is the time it takes for the Earth to rotate once on its axis and a "year" is the time it takes for the Earth to go around (orbit) the sun once. The other measures, seconds, hours, weeks and months were invented by humans to create smaller chunks of time. The class looked at calendars and answered questions like "What is the date 9 days from March 11th?" The children also learned the equivalent time measures because many of these must be memorized as they cannot be easily figured out. For example, 1 year = 52 weeks. The students practiced reading and writing times and drawing time correctly on an analog clock face. In grade 2, the students are required to read and write the time to the quarter-hour (9:00. 9:15, 9:30 and 9:45). Grade 3 students are required to be able to read and write the time to five minute intervals (9:05, 9:10 etc).

In art, the children created collages based on the illustrations in the book "Wabi Sabi" that was read aloud this week. Using only torn paper (construction paper, newspaper, magazine pages) the students glued their paper pieces to create animals and other images. "Wabi sabi" loosely translates to "finding beauty in ordinary things". The students made beautiful "wabi sabi" art from scraps of paper.

In writing, the class continued to learn about and write poems. We focused a lot on Japanese poems called "haiku". These are short poems that emphasize the "beats" or syllables in words. The basic pattern is three lines of words. The first line has 5 beats, the 2nd line has 7 beats and the 3rd line has 5 beats. The students wrote haiku poems based on the torn-paper collages they made and the paper snowflakes that they created last week. Here is a haiku that we wrote together as a class:

Snowflakes are falling,

They are very delicate,

None identical!

In science, the children wrote their observations on the liquid/solid crystal experiment they set up last Friday. They learned about the scientific method, where scientists record the materials they used, what they did, what they observed and why it happened. Recall the students dissolved borax powder in hot water to make a clear solution and left a pipe cleaner in the cup over the weekend. On Monday, the borax came out of the solution and made beautiful, cube-like crystals on the pipe cleaner and the plastic cup! They class talked about how this happened. At the beginning of the experiment, the borax dissolved in the hot water. It "hid" in between the large spaces between hot water molecules. When the water cooled down, the water molecules got closer together and the borax could no longer "hide". So the borax made crystals on any surface it could find. We also made a connection to ice crystal formation that we discussed last week. (Recall a snowflake needs a tiny speck of dirt in the centre to form the ice crystals.)

The students looked at soil and what is found in any type of soil. There are inorganic (non-living) things like rocks and organic (living or previously living) things like sticks. The children set up and experiment to see what happens to a leaf buried in soil over time. Each child buried a piece of leaf from our potato plant into a small cup of soil. This project will take a few weeks and we will revisit this experiment when the children return to school in January. 

The children continued to learn about and sing traditional winter and holiday songs. This week they sang, "All I Want For Christmas is my Two Front Teeth", "Walking in a Winter Wonderland" and "The Hockey Song", among others.

Books read aloud this week

Wabi Sabi by Mark Reibstein

The Hockey Song by Stompin' Tom Connors

Those Can-Do Pigs by David McPhail 

The Velveteen Rabbit by Margery Williams (chapter book)

Frosty the Snowman (DVD)