We've had some exciting new arrivals in our class... caterpillars! They've already grown a lot since we first got them! We've been learning about what their metamorphosis process looks like. We've also really enjoyed this funny book about a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Many of us have had fun grabbing it to read on our own throughout the week. In Math, we've been learning to count by 2s to the tune of "We Will Rock You." We went outside to draw number lines and find items from nature to represent the numbers. In French, we continue to work on our digraph sounds. And we never miss a chance to celebrate with our friends when they move up a level with their reading! Last week, we used the class cameras to take a picture of something interesting. One of our friends thought he was being funny by taking a picture of bird poop, but much to his surprise, Madame thought it was an excellent idea! There are so many things that we can learn from examining an animal's poop! We decided to go on a poop hunt during our forest walk, then examined the photos the next day to try to guess which animal made the poop, whether it was fresh or old, if we could see evidence of what the animal ate, etc. Extra photos... Thank you to Michelle for all of the "forest walk" pictures since Madame forgot her own camera! Finding possibly the friendliest dog in the world who revelled in all of the attention...
Happy World Book Day! both from Gryffindor house!... And it was also Earth Day! We took some time to go outside and find/photograph something in nature that we found interesting, then followed that up with a picnic! We also really enjoyed watching the modernized version of "the Lorax" movie today. For the past several weeks, we have been focusing on different famous "Earth heroes" so after watching the movie, Madame asked us, "Who do you think is our Earth hero this week?" Lily ventured a guess: "All of us?" ...YES! We can all be Earth heroes when we take the time to care for the beautiful world that we live in.
Joyeuses Pâques! (Happy Easter!) Madame decided that we'd probably be getting enough sweets between the PAC Easter cookies and the class store, so instead of a chocolate egg hunt, we went on a scavenger hunt today for gold coins. We thought we would be exchanging each gold coin for a nickel to spend at the class store, but... PLOT TWIST!... Madame ended up giving a whole quarter to those people that she saw sharing their gold coins with friends who didn't have any. Sharing, caring, and being a friend is worth more than any gold coin. In the end, we all walked away with an extra quarter in our pockets since Madame was also in a sharing mood. We tried out a new nature walk today. Instead of our usual Hoffman Park adventure, we went the opposite direction to Mitchell Rd. Park. We had so much fun playing on the playground, climbing trees, kicking a soccer ball around, and taking the forest path adventure back to Harris Rd. at the end. In other nature news, our bean plants have grown like CRAZY!! We planted these just last week and were amazed to come in on Monday to find how tall they had grown! We were also excited to see that the water collection bucket that we put in the garden had actually been filled with some rain water to use for watering our bean plants! Our "Earth Hero" of this week was Jane Goodall. We learned about how she dedicated her life to studying chimpanzees in the wild and how she worked hard to defend and protect the jungles they live in. We realized that we don't have jungles around us, but we DO have forests. Jane Goodall's story made us think about how the bears we sometimes see in the city might be wandering around because we've cut down the trees that they live in. Many of us were inspired and wanted to do our best to defend our forests as best we can. We are discovering the "nature lover" in us, as several of us students explained to Madame. :-) And what better way to enjoy nature than to enjoy a meal surrounded by it?? We had our first picnic of the year this week and some of us even enjoyed eating in a tree. In Math, we are learning about the relationship between addition and subtraction. They're opposites! How cool is that?! We really loved playing a card game that had us practicing these opposite skills. Extra pics...
Well, Mom and Dad, you made it... You survived 5 different themed days in one week. And Spring has come to our classroom, including to our sensory bin! In our photo-taking adventures last week, many of the students were unsurprisingly very taken with the cherry blossom trees. We decided to investigate these trees a little further and discovered that they're actually not from BC, but are in fact from Japan! We enjoyed looking up Japan on Google Earth and seeing how far it is from our school. We also learned that there are many different kinds of cherry blossom trees and, armed with a picture directory, we went looking for some of the types that we could see around our neighborhood. Madame carefully took some samples (we usually want to leave flowers where they are for everyone...and the bees!...to enjoy them!), and we tried to match the samples to the photos. Our investigation of plants in general continues, as well, as we watch our bean plants sprout and grow larger by the day. We made our own little plant booklets to help us learn some of the French words to describe the parts of a plant, and we discussed what each of these parts does. The "Earth hero" that we've been looking at this week is David Attenborough. We learned all about his love of animals and about how he wanted to do whatever he could to protect them. In discussing what we, ourselves, could do to help animals, we came to the conclusion that we should pick up litter together so that the animals wouldn't eat it and get sick. On Thursday, we did just that! We loved working together to find every last scrap of paper, plastic, glass and metal that we could find around the school grounds and into Spirit Square. And speaking of animals, we have some new classroom pets! ...dart frogs! Now, Madame has a very interesting story to tell about raising native tree frogs in the classroom last year. Let's just say that the government got involved. Things got messy. And Madame was stuck raising 19 baby tree frogs, frantically trying to find a shelter for them before the government acted on their promise to seize them. Ask her about it later. She has much to say on this topic. Don't take species from their natural habitat. It's illegal. Lesson of the day. Soooo... as much as she prefers to have species native to our area in the classroom, this was NOT an option with frogs. The next best thing... dart frogs! They have been born in captivity and (sadly) will remain in captivity. But we sure do enjoy looking at their beautiful colours! One of the yellow and black ones is pregnant and will be laying an egg soon in the little film canisters in our vivarium. We can't wait to watch the metamorphosis process and are already enraptured with trying to spot them in their little habitat! The yellow and black ones seem to be more daring. The blue ones have been incredibly difficult to spot, darting away as soon as our shadows approach, but a few of us have managed to catch a glimpse of them. Feeding time was especially exciting today as we watched about a tablespoon of wingless fruit flies wriggling around in a container before Adriana got to dump them into the frog habitat. There was some concern that we wouldn't be able to do our "Jump Rope for Heart" event today because of the weather, but in the end, we went ahead with it. We had a lot of fun doing the different challenges! Extra pics...
|
Archives
June 2024
Categories |