News for November 10

News for November 10

This week the class did a great job performing “The Remembrance Day Song” at the two school assemblies on Friday.

In math, the children reviewed linear measurement concepts and practiced using rulers correctly and using place value to order the length of items. We started to learn about analog and digital time. We discussed the parts of an analog clock and practised reading and writing time, to the hour and half-hour, using digital and analog clocks. We also looked at the relationship between minutes/hours/days/weeks/months/years. The students learned a poem to help remember the number of days in a month plus a way to use the knuckles on your hands to decide if a month has 28, 30 or 31 days. 

The class spent a lot of time talking about peace and Remembrance Day and preparing for our assembly performance on Friday. The children wrote 33 words about what peace meant to them. We chose 33 words because we formally observe Remembrance Day on the 11th hour on the 11th day on the 11th of November (11+11+11=33). The students made decorations for the gym for the assemblies on Friday. They made poppies, large paper peace cranes and used small paper cranes to create a large peace sign. We visited the flags near the office and saw the names of people who went to World War I and II that were former students of our school. We made a video of the children reading their peace messages. 

In guided reading, the focus was on strategies to deal with words we don’t know when we are reading. We can use the pictures in the stories, context clues and dictionaries. The children also had a lesson on how to use a dictionary to look up the meaning of words. Did you know that adults know and use over 10,000 English words?

We began a shared read aloud book called “The Hundred Dresses” to help the students have a discussion about empathy. Empathy is the Toronto District School Board’s character trait for November. Empathy is a very difficult concept for children to grasp, but this book does a very good job to help them understand the importance of knowing and acknowledging how other people feel. 

Finally, the class had some time to work on our math contest. Now we have a set of posters to advertise our contest around the school!

Books read aloud this week:

What Does Peace Feel Like? By V. Radunsky

The Hundred Dresses (chapter book about empathy) by Eleanor Estes

The Peace Tree of Hiroshima - The Little Bonsai With a Big Story by Sandra Moore