News for February 23

News for February 23, 2018

This four-day week had the class sewing “glovetopus” stuffed animals, writing chapter books, eating lunch in the classroom and earning first place at the Kiwanis Festival!

Writing

The students began a big writing project this week. Each child is writing a chapter book using the “glovetopus” he/she sewed as the main character. (A glovetopus is an octopus made out of gloves.) We reviewed the stages of the writing process and how to divide the story into chapters. All the children have finished planning their stories and are now writing the rough copy sentences.

The children learned how to write the cursive letters h, o, p and s.

Reading

In guided reading, the children worked in partners to read a “probability” book and track the number of probability words in the text, in addition to reading and understanding the story. The groups will revisit the story next week and discuss the story and their findings.

During our daily read aloud time, I finished reading the exciting chapter book, Stone Fox. The book does not end the way the children predicted and they really had to use the comprehension strategy of “making a picture in your mind” to help understand what happened, because there were no pictures in the book to help them. The ending is so dramatic and moving, that I always have difficulty reading the words out loud, as I am crying from the emotional impact of the story. It was a great lesson for the students to see how an author, with only words, can make the reader feel such deep emotions. 

Math 

In math, the class began the unit on probability by learning the basic probability vocabulary words: certain, likely, equally likely, unlikely and impossible. The children created their own sentences to illustrate the meaning of the words and practiced judging the probability of various statements, for example, Ms. Rawlinson will sing on the morning announcements. This statement is unlikely to be true, but there is a small chance it could be true. The class also began to look at probability experiments, which will be covered in more depth next week.

We practiced using these probability words orally and we now have a chart on our door to track how often the children use these words correctly.

Science

As part of the octopus/glovetopus chapter book project, the class learned some facts about the octopus. Authors, even fiction authors, will often do research before writing their books to have more information about the subject or characters in the book to make the story more believable.

Did you know that the plural of octopus is octopuses? Did you know that the blood of an octopus is blue and each octopus has 3 hearts?

The children also worked on their individual animal research projects and started designing and creating their research posters.

Oral Communication and Media Literacy

Our guest on the Room 204 Interview Shows this week was Ms. Sullada. She is a grade 3 teacher at our school.

General Remarks

On Friday, all the English grade 2 and 3 students travelled to North Toronto Collegiate to sing in the Kiwanis Festival choir competition. Our school achieved the gold standard and came first place. Well done everyone!

The children also used their “genius hour” time to create houses/rocket ships/cars for their glovetopuses. Using empty Kleenex boxes and scrap paper, the students each used his/her imagination and shared ideas to each create a “personal space” for the glovetopus he/she made.

Books read aloud this week:

Stone Fox by John Reynolds Gardiner (chapter book - finished)

My Favourite Animal the Octopus by Victoria Marcos