News for February 28

We were back to the regular five-day school week and the children were busy finishing up projects, learning about graphs and practising how to spell and use the trickiest homophones in English...there/their/they're!

Math:   The students continued to do probability experiments to help their understanding and interpretation of the likelihood of events occurring. The class did several activities using spinners and predicting the likelihood of choosing a particular coloured block from a bag of blocks. Next the children rolled a single die 50 times and tallied how often the possible outcomes showed up. Theoretically, there it is equally likely for a 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 or 6 to be rolled. Then they rolled two dice and graphed how often particular rolls showed up. The class noticed that 6, 7 and 8 were the most likely to show up. We talked about why that was and the students worked to see which combination of numbers are possible when rolling two dice and we discovered that there are 3 different ways to get a roll of 6 (1+5, 2+4, 3+3), 7 (1+6, 2+5, 3+4) or 8 (2+6, 3+5, 4+4), so it's more likely to roll those three numbers.

The children are now learning about data management by learning about surveys and how to read, make and interpret graphs. Surveys are used to get information that can't be found using books or computers. Graphs are pictures of information. The children answer questions about the class by answering survey questions on the class whiteboard and using their name magnets to create a bar graph each time.

Reading: The children have now finished reading the six Martha the Talking Dog picture books. By reading books in a series, children can focus more on understanding the problem and solution in a story and inferring information, since they are already familiar with the characters and setting.

Writing:  Finally... the glovetopus chapter books are finished! Each student assembled her/his books and bound the final typed versions. These books are now a part of our classroom library for children to read during independent reading times. (Also...the glovetopuses were sent home and are now all in their new homes with the children that made them!)

The children have learned almost half of the lowercase cursive alphabet. This week the letters were: q, i, u, y, w, j, t, and r.

Science: The class chorally read three texts this week about how animals:  animal groupings, different animal body coverings  and animal camouflage. After reading the texts, the students wrote their answers to comprehension questions.

The students began to create their research posters by designing a title for each poster and creating a space for a drawing of his/her animal. Each child now has a graphic organizer to help collect facts about each animal, like "Where does it live?" and "What does it eat?". The children are using books and encyclopedias to read information about the animals.

Media Literacy/Oral Communication: Our guest on the Room 222 Interview Show this week was Ms. Heath. She is the music, drama and dance teacher for our class. This video can be seen in a separate posting.

Books read aloud this week:

Martha Speaks by Susan Meddaugh
Martha Walks the Dog by Susan Meddaugh
Martha and Skits by Susan Meddaugh
MarthaBlah Blah  by Susan Meddaugh
Perfectly Martha by Susan Meddaugh