News for January 12

News for January 12, 2018

Our first week of school for the year 2018 had the students writing poems about lemons, solving tangram puzzles and organizing our first episode of The Room 204 Interview Show!

In math, the children reviewed two-dimensional (flat) polygon shapes in geometry and learned about the ancient Chinese puzzles called Tangrams. Using the seven tans (pieces), they solved tangram puzzles and shared their strategies. The class did a “bell ringer” activity and solved 19 different tangrams in about 20 minutes. At the end of this activity, the children could solve a tangram puzzle in less than 30 seconds. Some students could solve these puzzles in 15 seconds! Later in the week the students designed their own tangram puzzles. We will be using these homemade tangram designs in another activity next week, when children will be able to solve the puzzles designed by the students. The tangrams they designed will become part of a class book that will be available in our class library.

The class reviewed and practised how to analyze and solve repeating patterns. The children are now able to recognize the “pattern core”, determine how many terms are in the pattern core, label the pattern as, for example an AB pattern and figure out what terms come next in the pattern. Then each student worked with a partner to use objects from around the classroom to create repeating patterns. I took photos of the patterns and the children analyzed the patterns printouts. These are now part of two class books (the class made a lot of patterns), that are now part of our classroom library.

In writing, the class continued to write poems. This week the students learned about similes, or how to use comparisons to give information for the reader to make a picture in his or her mind. For example, “blue is like the sky without clouds” or “Domo looks like a brown rug”. Using this idea, the children wrote simile poems about colours. Later in the week they applied this idea to write a poem using the 5 senses, inspired by a small piece of lemon! For example, “a lemon tastes like sour candies” or “a lemon feels like hippopotamus skin”.

In science, the class learned about the water cycle. In grade two, the children are required to know and understand the terms evaporation, condensation and precipitation. The class did a simple evaporation experiment by putting large drops of water on their desks and seeing that, overnight, the water disappeared. Where did it go? The water evaporated into a gas and became part of the air in our classroom. The class watched two episodes of The Magic School Bus, one about water and one about air. Of course the crazy weather this week allowed for a lot of discussion about precipitation! Did you know on Friday at 9:00 am the temperature was 7 degrees Celsius and after afternoon recess, around 2:00 the temperature was -2 degrees Celsius? In five hours the temperature dropped 9 degrees Celsius and we saw rain, freezing rain and snow, all in one day.

In art, the students learned how to use watercolour pencils. These look like coloured pencils, but they contain dried watercolour paint. After colouring a design, water is added and the colour turns into paint! The class used these watercolour pencils to create front and back cover designs on thick paper. These will be used to make the covers for personal art journals with blank pages next week.

Finally, the class began a new long term project that is a tradition in my classroom, The Room 204 Interview Show! The children talked about how to learn more about a person. For some people you can use google on the computer or get a book from the library or a store. However, for most people, you have to ask the person questions directly to get more information about him/her. We talked about the parts of a TV or internet interview show: credits, theme song, questions, the role of the audience. The children made a list of the people in our school that they would like to learn more about. They wrote down the questions that they would like to ask. They learned a class song to sing at the beginning of the show. Students will work in pairs to interview some adults in our school. Finally, we filmed our first interview on Friday. Dallin and Daniela interviewed the principal of our school, Mrs. Farrelly. This video can be seen in a separate posting.

Books read aloud this week:

Three Pigs, One Wolf and Seven Magic Shapes by Grace Maccarone

My Cat Likes to Hide in Boxes by Eve Sutton

The Tomten by Astrid Lindgren

The Tomten and the Fox by Astrid Lindgren

Wabi Sabi the Cat - A book of Japanese Haiku poems by Mark Rubinstein 

All the Water in the World By George Ella Lyon

The Magic School Bus: Water (DVD)

The Magic School Bus: Air (DVD