Happy Halloween! We had a great day playing spooky games in the dark in the gym, eating gummy worms and drinking witch's brew. Madame reassured us that she had special permission from the principal and the district to serve us her spooky concoction, which was made possible by the not-so-secret ingredient: dry ice. We learned that touching it with our bare hands could give us frostbite, but Madame Sorcière was very careful with her tongs as she cackled and mixed her concoction. We even tried to make our own witch's brew outside in the dirt. Some of our ingredients may have made their way back into the classroom, too, for some amazing mud pies. We had fun looking more closely at one of our pumpkins from last week. It's amazing how many seeds are inside! And it turns out that melting crayons on the pumpkin can make cool waxy hair! In Math this week, we've been wrapping up our patterns unit with a focus on music - the patterns we hear and the patterns in musical notation. We've been picking out patterns in well-known songs like "Hot Cross Buns", and even creating our own musical patterns! We're slowly learning to tap the patterns with French Canadian musical spoons. In the spirit of Halloween this week, Madame brought out some film canister ghosts for a spooky experiment. If we mixed alka-seltzer tablets with water, which ghost would fly highest?... the one with the hot water, cold water, or warm water? The majority hypothesized that the hot water would fly the highest, but as it turns out, the warm water ghost flew so high that it landed on the roof. Oops! A treasure for the maintenance crew to find! So why did the warm water ghost fly the highest? We realized that the hot water dissolved the alka-seltzer too quickly so it exploded before Madame even had time to get the cap back on the canister. The cold water dissolved the pill slower than the rest so the reaction was not as strong. In other news, we've been doing some research into squirrels. Madame showed us a crazy ninja squirrel video and we had so many questions! We wrote them all on the whiteboard and have been slowly adding to our information web throughout the week as we discover answers in books and through video clips. More to come on this topic... Extra pics...
We had an exciting first meeting with our "grands amis" (big buddies) this week for some special crafts! We were each paired with one or two buddies from Mme O'Neill's Grade 6/7 class. They have now started being our lunch monitors, as well, and we all just love hanging out with them! They will also begin doing daily buddy reading with the Grade 1s very soon. In Math, we continued to practice our French counting skills with the game of "What time is it, Mr. Wolf?" This not only gives us great counting practice, but also great French vocab opportunities! We also practiced some more patterning. We learned that one of the most important criteria for recognizing a pattern is that it repeats itself. We were gifted some class pumpkins from Aldor Acres last week so we put them to good use! We compared them with apples and hypothesized about which would be taller, wider, and heavier. Madame made sure that we all knew that some of the measurement work we were doing here was more like Grade 2 work so we shouldn't be frustrated if it felt difficult, but she likes giving us challenges and we can just do however much of it we're capable of completing. But our favourite part of this apple-pumpkin comparison investigation was hypothesizing and then testing which one would roll fastest down a hill! Most of us guessed that the apple would roll the fastest but, like good scientists, we needed to find out the answer for ourselves. And just for fun, we tried it down the slides, too. Because... why not?? We were delighted that our hypothesis was correct - the apple rolled the fastest time and time again. But, wait! That's not supposed to happen, Madame explained. Statistically, heavier objects SHOULD roll faster. The pumpkin should have won the race every time. So why didn't it? This was a great opportunity for us to discuss the fact that science doesn't always follow the rules because sometimes other things can get in the way. Some of our thoughts on why the pumpkin rolled slower: - it has a big, thick stem which made it not perfectly round - it could have gotten caught on things as it rolled - the person dropping the apple could have thrown it harder than the person dropping the pumpkin So even though our predictions didn't match conventional science, we still learned a lot! Sadly, or maybe not so sadly (depending on who you ask), our big pumpkin exploded during the hill testing phase. Happily, Madame was prepared with a plastic bag and we made sure to be good stewards of our environment and clean up our mess. This beautiful explosion then became the focus of our science investigation corner for the rest of the week. We used tweezers to pick out the seeds, examined them up close, counted them, etc. Extra pics...
We've been focusing on Fall and the change of seasons this week. And what better way to celebrate Fall than with a trip to the "pumpkin patch"! We had so much fun picking out our pumpkins and interacting with the animals! And our farmer clothing was on-point! Those Fall leaves have also been a source of inspiration in our lessons. We got to use eyedroppers in warm water to "extract" some frozen leaves and compare them with dry leaves. Some of us made the great observation that the water magnified the tiny details in the leaves, making those details easier to see. We talked about chlorophyll and how it makes the leaves appear mostly green during the Spring and Summer, but since the leaves produce less food in the Fall in order to prepare for Winter, the green from the chlorophyll fades away, revealing the other beautiful colours underneath. We made some colourful leaves of our own, scratching away the green crayon with coins to reveal the beautiful colours underneath! And to go along with our leaf theme, we've enjoyed having dance parties to our favourite Fall song: "Les feuilles tombent". We've also been using our beautiful Fall leaves to practice our counting and to create patterns, a theme we've been exploring in Math this week. In fact, we've been finding patterns all over the school grounds and ourselves! A big "merci" to the Rhodes family (former students of Madame's) who provided us with some real animal skulls to investigate in our Science corner. They found the skulls around their cabin and we're pretty sure that one of them is an eagle, but we haven't figured out what the other one is yet. Extra pics for your viewing pleasure:
We celebrated a National hero this week with our Terry Fox run. We were all very intrigued by Terry's story and had some great discussion about the word "persévérance". Perseverance is when you keep going, even when something is hard. Madame told us that it's not important to her whether we become the best readers or the best at counting to 100 in French... the important thing is that we keep trying, even when it's hard. We thought of the ways that we do this already in our lives and enjoyed singing along to the song, "Terry Fox La Persévérance". Another theme for this week has been Thanksgiving! We practiced singing along to the song "Merci, Merci", and then wrote in our journals about things that we're thankful for. Grade 1s did a great job of trying to sound out words on their own, and our Ks drew a picture to describe their thoughts and Madame helped with the description. We also talked about how we are now in the season of "automne" and the leaves are all changing colours. We went on a leaf colour hunt and brought back all kinds of colourful treasures! We used these to practice our French colour words and to make little Thanksgiving turkeys. In Math, we've been focusing on one number per day, following along with the calendar dates in October. We've been enjoying doing this outside, no matter the weather, and getting our whole bodies involved - jumping, clapping, leaping, etc as we count. We're learning about tally marks, dice (a mathematical concept called "subitizing"), and 10-frames. Grade 1s have also been doing something called "Mur de maths" (Wall Math) every afternoon as their ticket to playtime. We are slowly building on our basic mathematical concepts and practicing them in print each day. We've continued working on our French feelings vocabulary this week with the introduction of a new, special chart featuring our own pictures! We each got to decorate a stick to represent ourselves and every morning, we place the stick beneath the picture that best represents our feelings at the moment. We are allowed to move the stick during the day since feelings can change a lot. This process not only helps us to learn French vocabulary, but also to become introspective. Extra photos for fun...
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