News for February 1

This week the children began to learn about reading information on graphs, Chinese New Year and Groundhog Day and started to learn how to do cursive writing!

The class was excited to begin our cursive writing program this week. Learning cursive writing helps students because it will help them develop their signatures, read cursive writing and writing in cursive is actually faster than printing. In grade two, we learn the lowercase letters and use printed capital letters. So far, the class learned the cursive letters, a, d and g.

The children continued to work on writing their glovetopus chapter books. We worked together to finish writing our class chapter book about Karl the glovetopus. The students are working on editing their own writing to catch and correct mistakes before editing with the teacher and "Old Red" the pen.

Finally! Despite several student absences over the last few weeks, we finished filming the videos of the Reader's Theatre plays, "The 3 Billy Goats Gruff".  You can watch these videos in a separate posting.

In math, the children began the unit on data management. The students learned about tally marks, how to use tally marks to record information and how to easily read tally marks, using skip counting by 5's. The class talked about how graphs are pictures of information. This week the class focused on how to read pictographs and how to answer questions like, "Which is the most popular answer?" and "How many people answered this survey?" We also discussed how to use survey questions to get information that is not available on the internet or in books, by having the children in our class answer survey questions, making a graph and talking about what the graph tells us about the class. Did you know that the favourite fruit of our class is mango? We do because we did a survey and made a graph!

In social studies, the class learned more about two different celebrations and traditions: Chinese New Year and Groundhog Day. In preparation for Chinese New Year (which begins February 5th), the children learned how to make paper lanterns using Chinese red "lucky" envelopes. This was a great way to apply geometry knowledge by folding the envelopes and naming the various polygon shapes that are made and then stapling the folded envelopes together into a octohedron figure to create the lantern shape. Groundhog Day is a tradition where a groundhog, coming out of hibernation in his burrow is watched to see what he does. The story goes that if the groundhog sees his shadow, he will be scared and go back into his burrow, but if he doesn't see his shadow, spring will come early. Of course this is not based on science but it is a fun tradition. Spring begins on March 20th this year in six weeks time, whether the groundhog sees his shadow or not.

The students learned about the American artist, Andy Warhol. We read aloud a biography of his life and learned that he ate soup and a sandwich for lunch for most of his life. He used the cans of Campbell's soup as inspiration for some of his art. Did you know that one of his paintings of soup cans was sold for 11 million dollars? The children started to make their own art inspired by soup cans as well.

At the end of the week, the class, after a whole week of bitter cold and indoor recesses all day, we decided to make connections between some of our learning. We talked about our read aloud Martha the dog books (where Martha eats alphabet soup and the letters go to her brain instead of her stomach), Andy Warhol's soup can art, and the students own art inspired by cans of alphabet soup and we had a hot soup snack during afternoon recess on Friday. Did you know that we found all 26 alphabet letters in the soup? (We checked.)

Books read aloud this week:

Martha and Skits by Susan Meddaugh
Andy Warhol - Pop Art Painter by Susan Goldman Rubin
Doctor DeSoto by William Steig
Groundhog Day by Michelle Becker