This was a very busy four-day week at school, from the Terry Fox Run (when some students in our class went to the meet and some of Ms. Comor’s students came to our class) to our Thanksgiving Feast and two presentations in the auditorium (Earth Rangers and the author Philip Roy).
The class finished their time capsule books and we wrote a letter to “The Future Room 222”. We packed everything away in a box, taped it up and put it up on a high shelf, not to be opened until the last week of school nine months from now. It will be interesting to see what changed and what didn’t change.
In math, the children used a new kind of dice, decahedron dice, to practise single digit addition facts. Regular dice have 6 faces but decahedron dice have 10 faces so all the digits from 0 to 9 are represented. We also take a few minutes each day to practices skip counting orally. The class also has opportunities to apply counting strategies to quickly solve real-world math problems like, “How many living things are in our class?” and “How many human arms are in our class?”.
In science, the class learned about the group of animals called “fish”. Fish are animals that live only in water, breathe with gills and use fins to move around.
The students began making an ABC book and brainstormed the names of animals they know and sorted the names alphabetically.
The children played a writing game to help them use their imaginations when writing fiction stories. The students each got a sentence starter and had to write a few sentences to complete the story idea, for example, “One day the clouds rained purple grape juice and…”. We then had a sharing circle to share the stories.
The children worked in their groups to rehearse their sock puppet plays. This week they created “credits” or the words in a video or movie that tell the title, creators and stars of the movie.
In art, the students played a cooperative drawing game from the 1800’s called “Exquisite Corpse”. The children drew a head, body and legs on a piece of paper folded into thirds, BUT they passed the paper around so that three people actually drew the character.
On Wednesday, our class celebrated Thanksgiving by making and eating food for our Thanksgiving feast! The class made butter, bread and vegetable soup. The students shook the butter jar for one minute each to separate the butterfat from the liquid milk to make butter. The children learned that cooking is really science (biology/physics/chemistry) and mixed yeast, water, milk and flour to make bread dough to be cooked in a frying pan. The students each brought a vegetable and the children washed, peeled and chopped the vegetables and put them in a pot with water to cook into soup.I also added some quick cooking rice to the soup at the end of the soup’s cooking time. Please see recipes in a separate post.
While the children were taking turns helping to make the food, they wrote in their journals about why we celebrate Thanksgiving and they wrote about what they are thankful for in their lives. Some children had time to make Thanksgiving cards to take home to their families.
Later in the afternoon, the children learned about table manners, how to wait until everyone has been served to begin eating, how to say “Please pass the butter” to get something out of reach. Just like the story in the book “Stone Soup”, the class learned that when you work together, something wonderful can happen!
Books read aloud this week:
Fish Out of Water by Helen Palmer
Secret Birthday Message by Eric Carle
Stone Soup by Jon J. Math
Life-Size Zoo by Teruyuki Komiya
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