News for April 6, 2018

News for April 6, 2018

This four day week the children completed the preparations for our annual party, began comparing the read aloud book “The Iron Man” with the movie “The Iron Giant" and made over 260 bookmarks to give to our party guests as a “thank you” for coming to our party!

Writing

Each student finished editing their book reviews and wrote out the final “good copy” version to staple on colourful paper to display on their desks for our party.

Reading

The children finished listening to the read aloud book, “The Iron Giant”. This story was made into an animated movie that the children have started to watch. The class learned about the organizational tool called a Venn Diagram. This is an extremely useful way to compare the similarities and differences between two things. The class had their Venn Diagrams on clipboards to record things that were in the book (but not the movie), things that were in the movie (but not the book) and things that were in both the movie and the book. Did you know the Venn Diagram is named after the English mathematician, John Venn who introduced it over 100 years ago?

Math 

The class spent the week applying many of the math skills and concepts learned so far this year, as we discovered many facts about our 100 read aloud books. The children worked together to:

• put the books in the bins in order, from 1 to 100
• tally the total number of fiction, non-fiction and near fiction books
• tally the total number of hard cover and soft cover books
• tally the total number of female authors and male authors
• count the total number pages read aloud
• measure the length of the books, placed end-to-end
• measure the height the books, piled up
• measure the weight of the books

To learn more about the results of their research, please see the video we made at the end of this posting.

We also measured out a length of plastic ribbon that’s the same length as the length of our 100 books placed end-to-end (27m 19cm) and hung this from the ceiling of the classroom. Did you know that the length of our 100 books is about the same length as the blue whale (the largest animal on earth)?

Art

The children wrote “artist cards” for their treasure jar artwork, giving a title to their art and writing about how they made their artwork and what inspired them (Andy Warhol’s paintings of Campbell soup cans). These are now on display alongside the art in the hallway.

Oral Communication and Media Literacy

The students worked in their groups to create posters to present their results of their math work about our 100 read aloud books. These posters were on display at our party. We also made a video of the presentations. Here is the video:

Books read aloud this week:

The Iron Man by Ted Hughes (chapter book finished)

The Iron Giant (DVD