This week’s highlight was Identity Day!! Each of us chose something that we are passionate about, created a display and then shared it with the school. We loved it!! We had lots of fun sharing our projects with visitors to our class, but we also enjoyed visiting other classrooms to find out about their passions. We noticed that many of us have common interests. It was a great community builder and we are already looking forward to next year!! Everyone loves hearing stories, especially the funny ones shared at family dinners. They provide great entertainment! But certain kinds of stories are much more than just entertainment. First Nations, Inuit, and Metis cultures have long passed on knowledge through the oral sharing of personal or traditional stories. Story-telling is used as a teaching tool to build character, instill moral values and to teach about customs, history and values. One of our tasks this week was to ask our parents about family stories that have been passed down over the years. Many of those stories touched on family values, including religion and equality. It was fascinating to hear how diverse they were. As we learn more about interactions between First Peoples and Europeans we’ll be thinking about the importance of oral tradition in maintaining culture. We were also busy finding sums! Although it is important to use numbers to solve equations, it is equally important to use manipulatives, such as base 10 blocks, to develop our conceptual understanding. It allows us to visually represent, add and then regroup numbers to determine the sum of an equation. We’ve had a lot of fun working collaboratively to represent and add three-digit numbers. Our plant living in darkness (on the right) continues to puzzle us with new growth. The leaves are becoming lighter in colour, but they are still a bold green. We’ve been fascinated while making observations and predictions about what will happen. Who knows how long it’ll survive!
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Over the past few weeks we’ve been exploring how living things sense and respond to their environment. We have discovered that bats and dolphins use echolocation to find food and to navigate in darkness. Bats make calls as they fly and then listen for the echoes to build up a sonic map of their surroundings. Dolphins produce high-frequency clicks that create sound waves that travel through the water around them. Fascinating! Our most recent activity involved reading through a non-fiction text about a specific species and summarizing how it uses its senses to survive. We then shared that information with peers. We learned that owls have excellent hearing and can hunt in complete darkness and sea scallops have hundreds of tiny eyes and can see in all directions! Magic and humour captured our attention during our “Be a Bucket Filler” assembly this week. We loved seeing the magic tricks and were fascinated by the rabbits and doves that were used to deliver a message about kindness. We are all born with invisible buckets that hold our good thoughts and feelings about ourselves. When our buckets are full, we feel happy, but when we feel sad our buckets are empty and need filling. Everyone needs their buckets filled and everyone can be a bucket filler! The magician showed us that the more we give kindness and love, the more they multiply and come back to us! Our goal: we need to be bucket fillers! Nov. 16 might sound like just another day, but it is an important day of remembrance and celebration for the Métis in Canada. It is a day to commemorate the life of Louis Riel – a Métis leader who fought hard for human rights and was an advocate for the Métis culture. To build our background knowledge, we watched a non-fiction video and shared what we learned about Louis Riel. We were lucky…and grateful… to have had one of our parents share some mini 3D Red River cart puzzles and a colouring book with us. We loved building the Red River carts that are a symbol of Métis identity. Louis Riel Day is an important day for all Canadians. Our ice skating field trip exceeded our expectations! Many of us initially had fixed mindsets (I'm not good at ice skating), but our growth mindsets encouraged us to give it a shot...and we were so glad we did! We had loads of fun!!
We were really puzzled by the plant in our Science experiment this week. When we took our plant out of darkness and compared it to our plant that’s had exposure to the sun. What we saw wasn’t entirely what we had expected! Some of us had predicted that the leaves would change colour, that the stem would bend or that the plant would die. We were right about the plant getting brown spots on the leaves. We also noticed that the plant with access to sun had grown taller than the other plant. But what we didn’t expect to see was new growth (baby leaves) on our plant in darkness! We were puzzled by how the plant was able to shoot new green leaves without having had access to sunlight. To find out a little more we tweeted Science World and discovered that coffee plants are used to having limited light. It likely had lots of stored energy. We’re curious how long it will take to see further changes in the plant. Our experiment (and our curiosity!) continues… In real life, estimation is part of our everyday lives. When we’re thinking about how much time is left before the bell rings, how long it will take to read a book or how many 5 cent candies we can buy with two dollars, we are using estimation. Instead of just adding or subtracting numbers according to place value, estimation involves lots of thinking. We need to be able to analyze numbers and then decide whether to round numbers or use front-end estimation. To practice, we chose ten grocery items from a list and then used rounding to estimate the sum or grand total. We had lots of fun sharing our grocery lists verbally with peers. A Math lesson that didn’t involve a pencil...there’s a first for everything :) Growth Mindset - What is it? We used to think that our intelligence was fixed – meaning we were either smart or we weren’t. Scientists have proven that that is simply not true. Instead our brain is like a muscle – the more we use it, the stronger (and smarter) it becomes. That’s growth mindset. To get started learning about growth mindset, we read the picture book The Most Magnificent Thing by Ashley Spires. In that story, the main character has an idea – she wants to make the most magnificent thing. Although she knows just how it will look and how it will work, making it is not easy. Instead she tries and fails. She tries again and fails. After trying several times, she gets mad and wants to quit. After following her dog’s advice and taking a walk, she tries again – and this time she gets it! The story led to a great class discussion about experiences we’ve had when learning something new. We also thought of a time when we weren’t successful at something. We finished the week by making art for the Remembrance Day Ceremony and cards for local police officers who are dealing with grief. A reminder to us of what it means to be a hero.
Making connections, celebrating Hallowe’en & Day of the Dead, Emphasis & Social Responsibility –it was a busy week, but we had lots of fun while learning. Our week started by building on last week’s metacognitive reading strategy: making connections. When a reader makes a connection, they relate something in the story to something they’ve experienced (text-to-self), read about (text-to-text), or to something in the world (text-to-world) –and helps them develop a deeper understanding of the text. We put this skill into practice while reading Wild Robot. This week we also made connections after watching a movie called “Book of Life” that takes place on the Mexican holiday Dia de los Muertos (Day of the Dead). Many of us connected to the difficult decision that one of the characters had to make. Here was our task after watching the movie: LEARNING INTENTION: I can use metacognitive strategies to develop comprehension CRITERIA: • I can make a connection to an event or character • I clearly describe my connection • My connection is logical and makes sense Speaking of Day of the Dead, we had lots of fun celebrating. It was interesting to learn about and to compare it to Hallowe’en - skeletons hanging outside our homes on Hallowe’en have a very different meaning than skeletons on Day of the Dead. We used Day of the Dead skeletons in our work on the importance of emphasis in art. We needed to remember to include a focal point to grab the viewer’s attention. Check out our awesome skeletons: Throughout the term, we’ve spent lots of time building our knowledge and understanding of the Social Responsibility Core Competency. As we work with peers, we have been focusing on being kind, including others, being empathetic and building relationships. One of our Hallowe’en activities involved playing board games while also demonstrating social responsibility. We then had a class discussion about what went well during our activity and what we could individually focus on to be even more socially responsible. Having goals keeps us focused on growth. :) Check out our Hallowe'en spirit!
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AuthorWe are a curious group of kids who are excited to share our learning with you! Archives
March 2020
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