News for December 8

News for December 8

This week the children learned how to add and subtract two-digit numbers with regrouping, wrote author biographies about themselves and made homemade rainbow crayons!

In writing, the third set of books written by the children are finally finished! Recall the children were challenged to write a fiction story about a little plastic figure. They wrote, edited and revised the stories themselves (I typed them), created illustrations, front and back covers. This week they wrote an author biography about themselves to include at the back of the book. These books will now be become part of our classroom library.

The class practised their letter writing skills and their book reviewing skills by reading the book of a fellow student and writing a letter to them. In the letter, each child wrote about a favourite part of the story and suggested something they could do to improve their writing. Each letter also had a question about the story for the book author to answer. 

The class learned about the life of the poet e e cummings. He was famous for writing poems with no capital letters and little, if any, punctuation. He used words like an artist uses paint. The students tried writing poems like this using random words and words cut out of magazines and arranging them on the page in an artful way.

In math, the class reviewed basic addition and subtraction strategies in advance of proceeding to adding and subtracting with regrouping. Then using place value blocks, the students modelling addition and subtraction with regrouping. At the end of the week, the children learned the algorithm to add and subtract two-digit numbers on paper with out the use of blocks. The class also used these skills and applied them to solving word problems

In science, the children did an experiment applying what they know about liquids and solids to create large rainbow crayons. First they removed the paper from lots of different coloured crayons and sorted them into different colour groups. They wrote the steps of the procedure in their journals and explained, in a science way, about what happened. Specifically, as heat was applied to a cup of wax crayons (buy putting it in a “bath” of hot water), the crayons melted together. When the heat was removed and the wax cooled down, it became a solid again. The children then had a chance to draw pictures using the BIG crayons they made themselves!

Miss Judy, our mindfulness teacher, visited again on Tuesday to help the children identify their feelings and practise their mindful breathing. She also gave the class an introduction to meditation practice. 

The day of concert performance is almost here! The children have worked very hard to practise their singing and dancing. This week the students got their costumes and practised each day to be ready for the big day next Tuesday.

Books read aloud this week:

A Poke in the I - A Collection of Concrete Poems) by Paul B. Janeczko

Enourmous Smallness - A Story of e e cummings by Matthew Burgess

365 Penguins by Jean-Luc Fromental

Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin