C'est l'Halloween... HEY! C'est l'Halloween! We had a great pre-Halloween day with all kinds of amazing costumes, some spooky French stories, and some arts and crafts! In fact, there has been a lot happening around pumpkins all week! We finished our pumpkin art and have been studying the life cycle of the pumpkin through song (the recording features the students singing with me!) and through a cut-and-paste sequencing exercise. This week we concluded our shapes unit by building towers out of 3D shapes. Madame gave us the difficult task of working in a group of 4 and doing only ONE tower. This required a lot of teamwork, communication and compromise. Many of the groups started with at least two separate towers and had to figure out how to join the towers together in a way that made everyone happy. In the end, most of us were really successful and we practiced using the phrase: "Ça c'est un..." for identifying the different kinds of shapes on our towers when we presented them to the class. Next we dove into patterns and it was patterns here, patterns there, patterns, patterns everywhere! We found them on our clothes, in the classroom, and on the playground equipment. We discovered there were patterns on the school building and that we could make patterns with items that we found in nature. We observed that patterns aren't always linear... they can be round, stacked and swirly too! Later we had a mini musical notation lesson and learned that there are patterns everywhere in music! We used patterns to create our own music and then played our compositions on the xylophone. We've been taking advantage of some breaks in the rain to do our afternoon playtime/reading with Madame outside on occasion. Madame pulls us one at a time to spend about 5 minutes each sitting on a bench reading with her while the rest of us play. Until now, we've been focusing on just the Grade 1s' reading, but some of our Ks have also been reading with Madame when they bring in their flashcard boxes to exchange. Madame has been so impressed with everyone's efforts! Joyeux Halloween!It was a short week, but still packed with activities! Madame may have stretched us to our limits... ...but we were good sports, as always! Our focus on shapes in Math brought us to sorting and categorizing them based on their different attributes. First we practiced pulling out all of the shapes that looked the same, and then moved on to creating different sorting "rules" - by colour, by number of sides or points, etc. We also learned that we could get really creative and use the shapes to make all kinds of designs. We even figured out that if we put two trapezoids together, it made a hexagon! We also learned about the difference between 2D and 3D shapes and had so much fun going on a 2D shape scavenger hunt around the classroom! We had fun with outdoor counting, as well, creating 10-frames and tallies out of natural materials. But Science this week was a blast... literally. Madame made 3 ghosts out of film canisters and we hypothesized about which ghost would fly the highest when we mixed water inside with an alka seltzer tablet - would it be the hot water, the cold water, or the warm water? One great hypothesis was that it would be the hot water that would work the best because hot air balloons fly but nobody has ever heard of a cold air balloon! It was time to put it to the test! iAlexandrea held the umbrella for us as a measurement comparison and as it turns out, the warm water was the secret to success! Our ghost nearly shot up to the roof! We realized that the hot water probably dissolved the alka seltzer too fast, just like how a bath bomb dissolves in water. It didn't have enough time to create a lot of bubbles. The cold water didn't dissolve the pill completely. But the warm water dissolved the pill slowly, creating lots of bubbly pressure that EXPLODED! Just for fun the next day, we tried continuing with our explosions by doing a Mentos and Coke experiment. But the stores had been all out of Original Mentos and apparently Mint Mentos doesn't work as well. Madame seemed disappointed but we were still excited with the small geysers that erupted! And pro tip: Diet Coke works better than Regular Coke. In other news, we've been enjoying doing some daily silent reading - sometimes indoors and sometimes out. Most of us can't read the words yet, but we enjoy "reading" the pictures and going on treasure hunts for the sounds we've been learning during the week. We've also begun working on some pumpkin glue resist art, using shading and colour blending techniques with pastels. More to come on this next week! The weather has been amazing so we couldn't resist the opportunity for bug hunts, monster truck races down the slide, and other outdoor investigations. Madame was also very happy this week to find out that even students' pets have been getting involved in learning our calming strategies... Great job, kitty! Also, a shout out to Alexandrea and Catherine who, even while on vacation in Tofino, still managed to complete their weekly literacy work!
Fall is in full swing here at PME with pumpkins, crunchy leaves and... animals? Ok, so baby animals aren't typically a symbol of Fall, but we were very excited to see them and touch them when the pumpkin patch came to our school this week. Cows and sheep and goats and piglets and bunnies and chicks... oh my! We also loved that we got to pick our own pumpkins from the little "patch". A big "thank you" to everyone who made this happen for us! We spent the next couple of days doing all kinds of fun things with our pumpkins. In Science and Math, we compared and measured their height, circumference and weight with that of an apple. We also made hypotheses about which would roll fastest down a hill - the pumpkin or the apple? Most of us guessed the apple. We had some great ideas: because it's smoother, it's lighter, it doesn't have a big stem to get in the way... And since any good hypothesis must be tested, we took the pumpkin and apple to the hill at Spirit Square to race them down the hill. Unfortunately the apple kept getting stuck on things as it rolled down the hill so Mrs. A, our transition EA, had the great idea to try rolling them down the slides! We found that the metal slides were so ridiculously fast that it was hard to tell which one actually won. But Science is all about making adjustments so we moved our experiment one final time over to the small yellow slides. This seemed to be the perfect venue. And to our surprise, the pumpkin won every time! We asked some great questions about why that might have happened and we concluded that, just like how adults go faster down the water slides than kids, heavy things might roll faster down a hill than lighter things. We had so much fun with this experiment that Madame let us play with dropping the pumpkin and apple down other things as well, including the bumpy slide. Our final test was a "drop test". Which one would drop the fastest? At this point, we were already becoming experts at the whole "heavy" vs. "light" idea and the popular vote went to Team Pumpkin. Sure enough, when Madame dropped both the apple and the pumpkin from the same height, the pumpkin easily won the race to the ground. And bonus... it exploded and spilled its seeds all over the floor. A perfect opportunity to talk about pumpkin seeds and how they grow! And for the last "pièce de résistance" with our pumpkins, we created some melted crayon art using a heat gun and some of Madame's broken crayons. But it wasn't all pumpkins and apples this week. We also did lots of singing about being thankful and about our feelings, and continued our Math investigations about shapes by creating them with our bodies. And the week ended with Farmer Day! Madame found her twin... Mrs. Beveridge, our Vice Principal, even came and read us a farmer story! It was fun for us to get to know her a little better! Some other fun photos for your viewing pleasure... The bathtub is magnetic!
Merci, merci! (thank you, thank you!) for a great week! With Thanksgiving just around the corner, we had a big focus this week on being thankful and on turkeys, of course! We spent some time gathering leaves of different colours, shapes and textures to create our own little pinecone turkeys. In the process, we learned about the differences between pinecones from Douglas Fir trees and those of Pine Trees. (Ask us to describe the difference to you!) We also had so much fun learning about the seeds from Maple Trees, chestnuts and their shells, etc, that some of us began bringing in treasures that we found on our own at home. We even made some art out of them. The Grade 1s wrote out the things that they are thankful for on little slips of paper, while the Kindergarten students dictated their answers to Madame. The final result is a little Thanksgiving turkey gift for Maman et Papa. In Math this week, we continued practicing our counting by doing a nature scavenger hunt outdoors, using 10-frames to count the items we found. We also spent some time in Spirit Square, jumping up the steps to count forwards, and then coming back down the steps to count backwards. We learned that there are a different amount of steps on one side of the band stand seats than the other! Now that we are getting so good at recognizing our numbers, we began a new Math unit this week on shapes! Madame introduced us to her ca-raaaazy shapes parody of Mambo Number 5. She even brought out her trumpet (but made sure to play it facing away from us because...COVID). ;-) We took our shapes learning outdoors, too, spending time on the first day with our big buddies/little buddies drawing out the shapes that we know already in chalk. On Day 2, we went on a shapes photo scavenger hunt around the school grounds. It's amazing how many shapes are all around us that we never even thought about! Madame uploaded all of our photos to the computer so that we could review them the following day on the Smart Board. We loved being able to use the magic markers to trace over our shapes directly on the photos. We were noticing shapes everywhere afterwards, including in our lunches! "Madame! My cucumbers look like circles!" "My sandwich is cut into triangles!" "My lunchbox is a rectangle!" In Science, we've had fun this week with our ongoing colour mixing experiment. We started with just the primary colours and then watched over the course of several days as the colours slowly crawled along the paper towels and mixed to create new colours! We are getting very good at identifying our colours in French! We've also had fun this week trying out some different toys in the classroom!
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