News for May 25, 2018

News for May 25, 2018

This 4-day week the children used discarded Sun Chip bags for their math lessons, painted butterflies and rehearsed their plays.

Writing

The children finished their writing and drawing in their caterpillar and butterfly journals. They finished writing and illustrating their partner fairytales.

Math 

The children spent the four days this week using their math skills to study the Sun Chip bags they collected from pizza lunch last week.  First, the students played the “Where’s the Math?” game and wrote down their math questions about the bags. First they estimated and then counted the number of bags (160 bags), measured the length, width and perimeter of the bags, counted the number of ingredients in Sun Chips and even worked with a partner to tally the number of vowels on the front of the bag! On Friday morning the children worked together to put the bags end-to-end down the hallway outside of our classroom and measured how long they were (30m 79cm).

Science

The class completed our four-week study of caterpillars and butterflies. During the week the 22 butterflies lived in the butterfly cage in our classroom. The class continued to work through the questions that they had about the butterflies and wrote down facts in their science journals. Did you know that a butterfly actually has two pairs of wings? Each wing is made up of two parts: the forewing (top) and the hindwing (bottom). Did you know that a butterfly drinks through its tongue, which is hollow and its tongue rolls up into a spiral and is stored in its vertical mouth? The class also learned that the colour patterns on a butterfly’s wings are made with overlapping scales. Actually, a lepidopterist is someone who studies butterflies and Lepidoptera means “scaly wing” in Latin.

On Friday, the children went to the playground to release the butterflies. The butterflies flew far away and higher than the school! It’s their DNA that “tells” the butterflies how to fly. It's a happy/sad time as the class was happy to set them free but they were also sad to say good bye to the creatures that they helped to raise from 1 cm long caterpillars. 

At the end of the week, the children took home a small container with an empty chrysalis inside as a memory of our class butterfly project.

Art

The students finished their canvas paintings that were inspired by the paintings of Dayal Kaur Khalsa.

The students used what they knew about math symmetry and the structure of butterflies to create beautiful, colourful, symmetrical painted butterflies. Using dots of acrylic paint on paper, the artists folded the paper in half and squished the paint around to create symmetrical designs. When the paintings were dry they made bodies for the butterflies out of construction paper. Next week these will be displayed in our hallway to create a “kaleidoscope of butterflies” (collective noun).

Oral Communication

The children began to present orally, the fairytales that they wrote with a partner. The children are working together to read the stories aloud to the class. 

The class continued to rehearse the class play in two groups. The groups worked on creating signs and began to collect and create props for the performance.

Extra

The students had a bit of time to each make his/her own knitting “corker” to learn how to knit. Next week, the children will use these to begin to learn how to “cork” which is a simplified form of knitting.

As I s-l-o-w-l-y begin to organize my classroom to move everything to Vaughn Academy at the end of June, the children had a chance on Friday to use up consumable items like hollow tubes of plastic netting and beads. At this point in the year, it is wonderful to see what the students are able to create independently and how they share and build on ideas of their friends. We will be doing this every Friday until the end of school.

Books read aloud this week:

The Butterfly Alphabet by Kjell Sandved

Dragons Love Tacos by Adam Rubin

The Butterfly House by Sarah L. Smith