News for March 10

News for March 10

This week the class wrote silly stories, practised multiplication and division and did some math and art challenges.

The class reviewed the four main parts of speech. Humans like to sort words into nouns, adjectives, verbs and adverbs! The students used this knowledge to help them play the game, "Mad Libs". This is a game where the players are asked to write down various nouns, adjectives etc. Then they write these words into the blanks in a pre-printed story. The results are very funny! The class played this game twice this week and shared their version of the stories with their friends.

Each child created their own multiplication facts chart. This chart is like a paper calculator for multiplication. The children are allowed to use this chart as they learn their "times tables". This fact chart will also help them with division facts because division is the "opposite" of multiplication. The class used what they knew to solved words problems involving multiplication and division.

On Friday, the class reviewed 2D and 3D geometry concepts. The students learned how to fold paper circles into tetrahedrons or triangle-based pyramids. This is a tricky procedure that requires learning and remembering 10 different steps. The children were challenged to make a lot of these modular units and create bigger structures, alone or with a partner by attaching them together geometrically. That is, taping the units together face-to-face, edge-to-edge and vertice-to-vertice. The class managed to discover and create hexahedrons, octahedrons, decahedrons, larger tetrahedrons and two different ways to make icosahedrons!

The class learned about the Indian holiday "Holi" or The Festival of Colours (March 12 and 13 this year). Did you know that Hinduism is thought to be the oldest religion on Earth? On this holiday families and friend celebrate the coming of spring by throwing brightly coloured powders and water on each other.

On March 17th, it's St. Patrick's Day. St. Patrick was a man who went to Ireland 1,500 years ago to teach about the Christian religion. He used the common three-leaf clover to symbolize faith, love and hope. This is also called a shamrock. (The four leaf clover is a rare form of clover that is said to bring good luck.)

In one of our last formal discussions for our Traditions and Celebrations unit, the class learned about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. (Did you know that there is a holiday in the United States named after him?) He was a man who did an amazing amount of work to change the way people think about treating everyone equally. He managed to do this through his words and actions alone. He studied the great Indian leader, Mohandas Gandhi, who taught that significant change can be made using non-violent methods. The class also discussed that sometimes when we study history, we have to learn and talk about difficult subjects, but that it's still important to know about these things, so that it never happens again.

In science, we did a class experiment to prove that water condensing on the outside of a cold container come from water in the air. The children learned the basic part of the "scientific method" (purpose/materials/method/observations and conclusions) and wrote about the experiment and what they learned.

The class also had a chance to watch two episodes of the children's science program, "The Magic Schoolbus". They watched episodes related to our science unit about air and water in the environment.

The class was given a "paint chip" challenge. The challenge was to creat art using a paper strip of related paint colours. It was interesting to see the different ideas the children had. Some created flat pictures, some made sculptures and others even made rooms in boxes! The students were then asked to write about their artistic process in their writing journals.

Our guest this week on the Room 204 Interview Show was Ms. Ceneda. She is a teacher at our school. This video can be seen in a separate posting.

Books read aloud this week:

The Twelve Dancing Princesses (in the Fairytale Princess anthology from last week)

Goldilocks and the Three Bears - A Tale Moderne retold by Steven Guarnaccia

One Grain of Rice - A Mathematical Folktale by Demi

The King's Chessboard by David Birch

Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day by Mir Tamsin Ansary