I want to start this post by saying thank you to the parents for all their hard work over the past two weeks while the students were at home. I know that many of you were managing work from home as well as trying to support one, two, or more kids with their school work. I know what a challenge this has been. Thanks to all of your work, your kids have continued to grow and learn.
Our first four days back have been packed with activity and learning. Here is some of what we have been up to.
Students have done some journal writing this week to share what some of their favourite activities were at home and what they were most looking forward to this week back at school. I am impressed at how independent students have become with their journal writing and how adept they are becoming at adding some descriptive words to their work.
We also started a new reading and writing project this week. We have decided to use our growing skills in order to learn about a wild animal that lives in our neighbourhood. Students had so many animals that they were interested in that it was hard to choose just one that we could work on together. After several rounds of voting, we finally chose to learn about cougars. We will be using books, videos and on line resources to collect information. We will then do some non-fiction writing about cougars and we will finish by learning how to put this information into a google slide presentation. The students are very excited to learn about this amazing animal.
Our Math this week has been focussed on developing flexibility with addition and subtraction through learning about part, part, whole. We have been working on equations that are in a different order and that have a missing number, not just looking for the sum or difference. Example 4+__=12 or 16=6+__. This has been challenging work, but it really helps students develop flexibility in their mathematical thinking.
In Phys. Ed., we are revisiting skipping this month as a way to be physically active outside. We do have school skipping ropes, but I have told the students that they are welcome to bring their personal skipping ropes to school, if they like. If your child wants to bring his/her own rope, please ensure that he/she have their name on their rope so that there is no confusion. Students have become more comfortable with jumping with the teacher turning the big rope. I will be helping them to learn how to turn a large rope with a partner so that they can skip with a group of friends. We will also be learning some skipping rhymes.
We are wrapping up our colour unit this week with an exploration of using natural objects to create colours. Just before our on-line learning, we gathered up some natural materials and soaked them in boiling water to see if we could extract some colour. We used blueberries, strawberries, turmeric root, beet root, coffee, onion skins, and red cabbage. Students made predictions about the colours and this week we made observations of the results. We then used the natural colour to paint a landscape picture that we drew.
Thanks to all of the parents who sent in recycled materials for our upcoming building unit. We will be sorting our supplies after school today and will let you know if there is anything else that we are looking for that you can collect for us. The students are dying to find out what building projects we will be working on in the coming weeks.
The last 4 weeks of school always go by so quickly. Please check the blog each week to keep up to date with the things that we are doing.
