The highlight of our week was definitely the realization of the prize for which we've been striving for months - a full-class Minecraft play session. For many of us, this was our first experience of Minecraft and we were completely at a loss not only on how to login, but also how to place blocks and maneuver through the game. But we had lots of "experts" in the class to help us, including Madame's kids, Ella and Miles, who revel in the fact that they know WAY more about this game than their mother. The experience was such a positive one that we are looking forward to another game day in the future. We also got to go back to Hoffman Park again for the first time in what feels like ages! A huge "merci" to Alia's dad, Allan, for coming with us! In Math, we continue to work on our skip-counting and our addition. Madame had us use the "counting collections" this week and challenge ourselves to group the items that we were counting in a logical way so that they would be easy to count quickly and accurately. We are getting much better at coming up with appropriate counting strategies on our own. The addition work that we've been doing has spilled over into word problems. We are learning how to extract the important information, draw a picture to represent it, create an equation, and write a concluding sentence about it. This task was kicked up a notch for our Grade 2s this week with double-digit addition that required them to carry the "1". Madame is impressed with how well we are catching on to these complex topics! And speaking of complex, we continued our work with nouns this week, practicing the differences between common nouns and proper nouns. Madame gave us the task of sorting a variety of nouns into their appropriate categories and at first, we thought this was impossibly hard. Many of us believed that we couldn't read because the words weren't on flashcards or on the whiteboard like we're used to seeing them, but when Madame simply covered parts of the words with her finger and had us piece them apart, every one of us was able to read independently. The first go-around with this task was tricky, but Madame switched up the words and gave us the assignment again the next day and this time, almost everyone aced it on the first try! We discovered a sneaky trick... the proper nouns all had capital letters! We have also been trying to expand our writing lately. Instead of writing a simple sentence like: "I walk with my dog", Madame challenged us to take that sentence and add as many details to it as possible. Some of us got really creative! We also had another session with our Katzie friend, Lilly, who brought back the drums to continue teaching us a song that she wrote in her language of Halkomelem. We are getting pretty good at the lyrics and the drumming patterns!
We danced our way into the week with a visiting hip-hop group called "Metaphor". Their performance on Monday's Martin Luther King Jr. Day helped us to learn more about the origins of hip-hop and the difficulties that many people of colour experienced. They were very entertaining, even offering some students the chance to learn breakdancing moves and assist with improv. But the best part was at the end of the show when we got to watch all of our teachers bust a move at the front of the gym! We did a lot of our own reflecting on Martin Luther King Jr. Day, as well. We read a book about his life and had lots of questions! Then we talked about what OUR dream would be to make the world a better place. We had some great ideas! "I have a dream that people will take care of the Earth." "I have a dream that there will be no more wars." "I have a dream that everyone will be equal and that they will take care of the Earth." We also geared up for Chinese New Year today with a special directed draw, inspired by the Year of the Rabbit. And we got EXTRA lucky because both Madame and the PAC gave us lucky red envelopes! Madame's contained extra nickels for us to spend at the class store (woohoo!) and the PAC's was a thoughtful gift of candy. We even got a fortune cookie! Madame also shared with us her authentic Chinese kimono, which was purchased by her former travel-loving grandmother one time on a tour in China. We marvelled at all of the intricate details! Continuing on our space theme, our team challenge this week was to create paper rockets. Madame constructed a DIY stomp rocket contraption with PVC piping and a 2-litre pop bottle, and our task was to create the highest-flying rocket. We hypothesized about the design... what would fly best?... just a paper tube?... a paper tube with fins?... a paper tube with fins AND a nose? The "ours" (bears) won this challenge with their rocket that reached an astounding height, about as high as one of the tallest trees at the front of our school! But "castors" (beavers) also got bonus points for the best trick rocket, which flew fairly high and with all kinds of loop-dee-loops. Every one of our rockets got some decent height and we should all be proud. 10 points for everyone! In the end, we were all winners because we collectively wracked up enough points for our ultimate group goal of having a group Minecraft-playing session! Madame has reserved the iPad cart for next week. We'll see how this goes... heh... Thanks to some Christmas gift cards, Madame was able to buy a collection of new games for the classroom! Our favourite by far has been chess. Madame has been teaching us a new chess-piece move each day through stories. The "Story Time Chess" game comes equipped with a storybook that gives personalities to each chess piece to help cement in our minds what each of their moves should be. We have also begun a series of musical workshops with a young member of the Katzie First Nation who will be teaching us songs and drumming patterns over the next 6 weeks. We even learned some words in the Katzie First Nations' language of "Halkomelem". In academic pursuits, we've begun learning about parts of speech, namely "nouns" (les noms) - common and proper. Little did we know that Madame has actually been prepping us for this ALL year with our daily show-and-tell questions. At the beginning of every show-and-tell, we ask in French: "Is it a person, an animal, a place, or a thing?" So we have just finally given a name to that question... all of those items are NOUNS! Minds blown. (Ok, maybe we weren't as excited about this as Madame was.)
January 7th was Orthodox Christmas for Ukrainians and we were here for it! (...just a couple of days late). ;-) Lots of amazing questions and reflections arose about the current political situation in Ukraine, and Madame tried to answer all of our inquiries as best she could in kid-friendly language. Madame's son, Miles, was invited to perform a piece on the piano for us called "Ukrainian Girl". We were a great audience! We also enjoyed making and sharing a Ukrainian meal together (borscht and perogies). The borscht had mixed reviews but the perogies were generally a hit! Cooking is always such a great way to explore mathematical concepts like fractions, volume and capacity, as well as "every day" French vocabulary. We were very fortunate this week to have an Indigenous friend named JJ come to lead us in some drumming. Before we began, we enthusiastically shared our French land acknowledgment with him and the other classes present there, and he expressed how touched he was that Indigenous education has become so much more prevalent in our regular curriculum. One of our favourite songs was one that JJ wrote, himself, all about his beautiful young daughter. All of the girls danced in the middle of the circle while the boys drummed around them. In class, we have been enjoying earning and spending our nickels! Our French-speaking efforts have improved noticeably since we are paid bonus money for being brave and attempting to speak in French - not for our accuracy. Some of our Grade 2 students have also begun rotating the job of "banker" in the mornings, giving students the chance to "trade up" their nickels for other coins. We love comparing and counting our coins. In Science, we continue to learn about Outer Space with oh, so many questions. The librarian kindly gathered a box of books for us all about our solar system and we loved diving deep into different facts about the planets, sun and moon. Did you know that on Neptune it rains diamonds?? Or that you can fit 1400 Earths into the planet Jupiter? Madame is also learning all kinds of things as we go. Many of the books are in English, but the language is not as important as the follow-up discussions, especially because most of us can't read at this level yet. We mostly love looking at the pictures, making inferences, and then asking Madame about what we have found. And an extra photo, just because it's cute...
There's been a buzz of excitement around the class this week as we have finally launched our classroom economy! Think Monopoly... but lived out in real time. We all have assigned jobs (which rotate from week to week) and when we do our jobs well, we are rewarded with a nickel for our efforts. We also have our own "houses" - pictures of recognizable places from around our community that we have stuck to our cubbies. We are expected to pay rent each week for the privilege of "living" there (..."just like moms and dads have to pay to live in your house!"). Not only do we earn money from our daily jobs, but from other bonus opportunities, as well. The biggest cash cow is getting caught speaking in French, but we can also earn money when Madame notices us quietly being kind/helpful, or by doing extra jobs around the classroom. We collect our nickels in our personal money boxes and at the end of the week, we get to use our money to purchase something from the class store... to keep... like, forever! #mindsblown! We have been counting down the days until store day ("le magasin") for what feels like forever! But here's the catch... we can't make any purchases until we have done two things first: 1. paid rent on our home 2. donated a nickel to charity (because it is just as important to learn about giving as it is to learn about spending and saving) As a class, we really wanted to help some "kids without moms and dads" so we decided to donate our money to a charity that helps foster children. Madame has heard great things about the SOS Children's Village so in June, we will add up all of the coins that we have collected and then Madame will match our donation and we will send a cheque to them and have a little celebration! (Your children do not need to bring in any money from home for this venture. They are using the nickels provided in class. But if you would like to make an added donation, you're welcome to do so.) But circling back to our "homes", here's the thing... not everyone wants to rent their home for the rest of their life. Some of us would prefer to OWN our home and get rid of those pesky rent payments. So, if we save up 10X our rent ($0.50), we can PURCHASE our home and never have to pay a nickel to Madame again! We love this idea in theory, but it's much harder to fork over the $0.50 on store day when we would rather spend our hard-earned nickels on the frivolous items in front of us. We can even continue to save our nickels and buy up other properties so that other people have to pay rent to US!! Cha-ching! Many of us are already setting plans into motion. But we must all purchase our OWN properties first to give everyone in the class enough time and opportunity to buy their own "house" before it's scooped up by someone else. Often, Madame will assign a "banker" for the day whose job it will be to allow students to exchange their coins for different ones (i.e. 2 nickels for a dime, 2 dimes + 1 nickel for a quarter, etc.) We love trading our coins back and forth, often not even realizing that we're practicing key mathematical and life skills while playing. For those of us who are new to Madame's class, it may take a little while for us to catch on to some of the little nuances of the program, but it will be integrated into our daily classroom so Madame assures us that we will catch on quickly. It's kind of like reading the instructions of a new game versus actually playing it... it's so much easier to understand once you dive in and start. In completely unrelated news, Happy New Year! We rang in our own New Year's celebration on Monday with some balloon-popping fun... each balloon had a different surprise activity for us to complete, whether running around the school building, having a dance party, watching a French show, or playing a game... We also made our own New Year's "resolutions"... And we began designing pins that Madame will hand back to us when we achieve the personal goals that we set during our report card conferences. We've been following up on our trip to the Space Centre with talk about nocturnal vs. diurnal animals and we had the amazing opportunity this week to see a nocturnal animal up close - a real-live barn owl! (Some of these pictures have been taken from Mrs. Bateson). Extra photos...
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