What a wonderful week to take our learning outdoors once again. As we wrap up April, it is finally starting to feel more like spring. Here is what we have been up to this week:
We had a wonderful trip to Twelve Mile Coulee on Tuesday afternoon. Students were focussing on observing closely and documenting their observations in detail through drawing, shading and labeling. We also did an activity where we wrote what we "See, Think, Wonder". This allows students to look carefully at their surrounding and to think deeply and engage their curiosity about the environment. We were disappointed that, due to Covid, we could not spend some of our time on the land with Saa'Kokoto, but we had him in our hearts and in our ears. We took a speaker along with us and listened to a recording of one of his amazing stories as we sat in the grass in a clearing amidst the trees.
For our reading, our focus is on learning about long vowels and what different ways we might see a long vowel show up. For example, long o can be made the following ways:
o alone (old, only). ow (crow, window) o_e (note, hole) oa (road, goat)
Students are learning about the patterns of long vowels and are learning to try both long and short sounds in an unfamiliar word to see if they can tell which one sounds right.
Many students continue to progress with their reading of the high frequency list words. If your child recently received a new list, please help him/her to practice.
We enjoyed working on our Hip Hop dancing again this week on a live stream with the people from Sound Kreations. We learned to move our bodies in new ways to try and make ourselves dance like robots. It was so much fun.
The big concept that we began exploring this week is "Mood". To begin with, we brainstormed words that we know that describe our feelings and emotions. We then worked to use these words when we wrote about being in the coulee.
On Friday, we looked at some pieces of art that used bold colours. We discussed how the bright, colourful paintings made us feel. We then painted a flower with bold colours and described our feelings and what experiences these colours brought to mind. Next we looked at pieces of art that used pastel colours and noticed how those colours had a different feel to us. We added white to our bold colours to make pastel coloured paints and used them to paint a second flower. Our next step was to write about the emotions and memories that those colours evoked.
