News for April 12

News for April 12

This week the children watched a Canadian astronaut on a spacewalk, learned more about fractions and watched a 63 year old movie about the friendship of a young French boy with a balloon!

In writing, the children worked very hard to finish and publish their books based on the "flat" characters that they made. Rewriting a "good copy" of their edited and revised work, helps them to reinforce their learning about writing good sentences with proper punctuation and grammar. The children also made the covers and illustrations for their books. Most children have now finished this process.

After reading the book, The Red Balloon, the class watched the DVD movie, on which the book is based. The children then compared what was the same and what was different between the book and the film by writing notes on a Venn Diagram. This is a tool, basically two overlapping circles, where notes can be written to sort the ideas around what is the same, different and true for both. Did you know that the Venn Diagram was popularized by John Venn, an English Mathematician, in 1866?

In math, the children focused again on fraction concepts this week. The children named fractions, drew fractions and folded paper to represent fractions of a whole. The big idea this week was that as the number of equal parts of a whole increases, the size of each equal share decreases. This is a difficult concept for young children. At the end of the week, the children used their fraction knowledge to fold small books. On the pages, the children folded and cut paper squares to illustrate their knowledge of fractions.

The students made small versions of these folded books to create party invitations for families and staff and students for our 100 Books Party. The class also reviewed how to use the 5 W's (who, what, where, when, why) in order to provide correct and complete information on the invitations.

In science, the students read and discussed air and water in our environment. They read about how wind is formed and did an experiment to prove that air takes up space and an empty container really isn't empty because it contains air. Later in the week, the class learned about how water in recycled continuously in the environment, in the water cycle. The key words here are evaporation/condensation/precipitation. The children even observed a drop of water on their desks "disappearing" through evaporation into the air. (The water molecules go in between the air molecules.)

The class finished designing and sewing their new homemade drawing journals. Did you know that hard cover books have the pages sewn into the front and back covers? The children sewed the pages of their journals into the covers of their homemade books.

On Monday, the class watched and discussed the historic space walk by Canadian astronaut David Saint-Jacques. He was repairing a heating unit on the outside of the International Space Station. The children learned that astronauts from Canada, USA, Russia, Japan and Europe are all a part of the space station. The students watched LIVE video of the space walk. They also had lots of questions...did you know that the International Space station travels around the Earth 15 times a day, 400 kilometres above the Earth's surface and travels 7 kilometres every second?

In guided reading, as a result of the above discussions, the children were interested in learning more about meteors. So in our small groups, the students read about meteors and how to navigate some of the features seen in non-fiction texts (e.g., captions for photos). Did you know that meteors are also called "shooting stars" and that they glow or on fire because when they enter the Earth's atomosphere they hit gases which burn? Did you know that it's called a "meteoroid" in space, a "meteor" when it is burning in the atmosphere and a "meteorite" when it lands on Earth?

On Wednesday, the whole school went to the auditorium to see the magician, The Great Baldini.

On The Room 222 Interview Show this week, our guest was Ms. Heath. She is a music teacher at our school. This video can be seen in a separate posting.

Books read aloud this week:

The Red Balloon by Albert Lamorisse (now finished)
The Red Balloon - DVD
Fraction Fun by David A. Adler
How Pizza Came to Our Town by Dayal Kaur Khalsa
The Biggest Puddle in the World by Mark Lee