Criteria:
- I can share my opinion
- I ask others to share
- I support my ideas with reasons/details
- I listen respectfully (eye contact, body language)
Normally when we hear the word “patterns” we think of Math concepts, but this week the patterns we learned about actually connected to art. Ever heard of Romero Britto? He’s a Brazilian artist who uses lots of different patterns in his art. To find out more, we took a look at several different pieces of his art and noticed some common features. His art is filled with simple patterns, bold colours and think black outlines, so that became the criteria for our flower pop art activity. We’ve been exploring fractions over the past few weeks so the unifix cubes have certainly come in handy. Our first activity involved using cubes to make different designs and then using fractions to represent different parts of our whole. We also learned the meaning of “equivalent” after realizing that 1/3, 1/2 and 1/4 can be represented in many different ways. Great Math thinking. Sharing our ideas in a group discussion is an important part of learning. But often when we get together to discuss, one person ends up sharing while others simply wait for their turn to talk. Those “discussions” don’t feel like real conversations. To take our conversations to a deeper level, we watched a video of a group discussion in action and then shared what we observed. We noticed that the kids in the video were able to carry on their conversations by asking each other questions, adding details to further develop those ideas, and sharing their own opinions, even if that meant respectfully disagreeing. They also showed active listening skills (eye contact & body language). Watching this video gave us a different perspective on what our discussions could look like and led to us co-creating criteria for our group discussions. Here's what we came up with: Learning Intentions: I can share metacognitive strategies during group discussions Criteria:
Before finishing up the week and heading off to enjoy our long weekend, we learned a bit about the meaning of Easter with a picture book called …you guessed it! Easter. Although many of us celebrate the holiday, we didn’t realize that Easter is a Christian holiday (similar to Vaisakhi being a religious holiday). The picture book taught us a bit about the religious history of Easter. We then ended the day using watercolours to paint pictures of Easter eggs. We hope they were shared with our families. 😊
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Our Science Fair experiments are in full swing and we’ve been busy making observations and recording data! Check out all this learning in action: This week we also learned more about style in writing (see BC Performance Standards here). Style involves variety – variety with the language used (adjectives, interesting verbs) and variety with sentence lengths. We focused on the latter this week and before getting started we as a class decided that short sentences are 1-9 words in length, medium are 10-18 words and long sentences are 19 words and higher. After our teachers modelled the activity, we then took a sample of our writing and counted the number of words. Many of us were surprised to learn that most were short! And some of us noticed that only medium and long sentences were used. It became clear what we needed to work on, so we set some informal writing goals and put those into practise with our letters home on Friday. Looking forward to seeing more variety in our writing. In celebration of Vaisakhi, a few of our students shared the significance of the day with their peers and then led a craft activity. We learned that Vaisakhi is a day that marks the new year for the Sikh community in Canada and around the world and that Vaisakhi celebrates the creation of the Khalsa by Guru Gobind Singh Ji in 1699. Great leaders in Howden & Clackson’s class!!
We’re back into the swing of things after two weeks of spring break. And the beginning of a new term is a perfect time for us to set some new goals. This term we’re focusing on the Core Competency: Personal Awareness & Responsibility. To get us started we read Orca Chief by Henry Vickers and in the story, we saw characters who made mistakes and were able to take responsibility and ask for forgiveness. That led to a great discussion about the characters being able to manage challenges and persevere in difficult situations and how that shows personal awareness and responsibility. We also brainstormed other ways to show these, including being healthy and active, managing stress and regulating emotions. It was then time for us to identify what we could work on and to set goals.
This week in Math we created pictographs. We used stickers to represent our favourite pets and animals and then compared our results. We noticed that dogs are our favourite animal and that birds are our least favourite, but we also wondered how the data would have been different if it included hamsters, rabbits or snakes as an option. Great critical thinking. We also went outside and drew bar graphs with chalk on the pavement outside our classroom. Our graphs showed how far we could jump (in metres) and made it simple to compare our distances. Throughout our data analysis unit, we’ve seen how data surrounds us and how it can be represented in many different ways. Have you ever heard of post-it note art? We hadn’t until our teacher candidate, Ms T. introduced us to it. Post-it note art is exactly as it sounds – a collection of art made on – you guessed it - everyday 3x3 Post-It notes! We all needed to pick a theme…and we got really creative! Since September we’ve been using inquiry skills in Science. We’ve developed our scientific thinking while making predictions, recording observations, collecting simple data and drawing conclusions during a variety of different experiments. It’s been exciting to see our thinking and learning evolve in the process. Our next step in inquiry is participating in our school Science Fair!! We’ve all picked topics, have made predictions and are ready to begin our experiments. Here are a few of our topics: What cereal brands stay crunchy the longest in milk? What brand of balloon blows up the largest? Do different kinds of water (distilled, bottled, tap) affect the appearance of plants? Which creates a stretchier slime - Tide detergent or borax detergent? What is the effect of Nestea, Pepsi and water on plants? Which removes stains the best – lemon, vinegar or stain remover? What is the effect of caffeine on plant growth? Our week ended on a sad note as we said good bye to our student teacher Ms. T. She's been with us since February, and in that short time has had a big impact on our classroom. We'll miss her, but know that she has lots of great learning ahead in the university classroom.
It was another great week of learning in our classroom. Stay tuned for information about our experiments :) |
AuthorWe are a curious group of kids who are excited to share our learning with you! Archives
March 2020
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