Happy Diwali! This Hindu and Sikh festival took place on Monday and we were so fortunate to have two students in our class who celebrate it at home! One of them even brought in her special Diwali outfit and made us some decorations for the classroom. We learned about the history of Diwali thanks to our trusty friend, YouTube, and read several children's storybooks about it. Normally we meet with our Big Buddies in the library, but since that space was occupied with new furniture arriving, we had everyone squish into our classroom for some fun times making our own paper diyas (Diwali candles) and clay diyas. We also enjoyed sharing all our fun toys with our buddies and letting them relive their "childhood" by hanging out in the ball pit. Later, we tried floating our clay diyas, as many who celebrate Diwali like to do. We had mixed results with this experiment since our diyas were not made of the right kind of clay, but with some careful reshaping, some of us managed not only to get them to float, but also to hold a candle! We even tried making some rangoli art with pattern blocks. Normally this type of art is done with colourful powder, but this was our "clean" classroom improvisation. In Math, we continue to practice our number sense, learning about the many different ways to make a number, including (but not limited to) addition, subtraction, and multiplication. We were fascinated when we learned that we could subtract incredibly large numbers within seconds to arrive at "10" as an answer. All we had to do was change the number in the "tens" place by 1! We had so much fun checking our answers with calculators. We have also begun reviewing patterns in Math and Madame made us go outside in the RAIN to look for patterns around the school grounds. It's so amazing how patterns are everywhere we go! Our Thursday walk to the forest was cancelled this week on account of wind. Even though many of us were still motivated to go, Madame was worried that it may be too dangerous to be surrounded by trees in case large branches started coming down. So instead, we went to the school's courtyard for the first time this year. We had so much fun exploring, making mud pies (or "ice cream" and "soup"), staking our territory in the play castle, and figuring out how to pitch a tent. (Madame said she wouldn't set up the tent for us... we had to figure it out on our own). It might seem like this is all fun and games, but we are actually learning so many things outdoors, like teamwork, turn-taking, innovation, imagination, and problem-solving. We also discover new and interesting areas of interest. The past couple of times that we've been out, we've found some fascinating spiders and we have so many questions about them! Does this kind of spider always go in the water? Why doesn't it drown? Can all spiders swim? What kinds of spiders do we have living around us? Which ones bite people? ...So many questions that Madame decided we should start a Science inquiry about spiders. Madame also let us get our hands dirty this week and carve a pumpkin! We tried to vote on a cohesive design that we would all love, but in the end, we voted to each just do our own unique design. The result was an interesting mixture of blobs and bloops as we realized that none of the details of our designs remained after we cut them out, but we were proud of our work, nonetheless, and mostly just enjoyed the process of using little carving knives. And for our team challenge on Friday, Madame had us all make pumpkin seed catapults! First she let us have at 'er without any instructions - just a bunch of random materials. But after a few interesting, albeit slightly faulty design attempts, Madame showed us a practical way of using our resources. Pumpkin seeds were flying all over the place by the end! (And this is why the custodian loves Madame). Extra photos...
We had a bit of a different week with the smokey air cutting out some of our recesses and canceling our plans for a nature walk. But instead, we got really creative with building materials and moved our bodies a lot with an amazing website called GoNoodle. We were able to finish our pumpkin art this week by completing our lessons on warm/cool colours and transferring our knowledge into something beautiful and unique. Madame says she loves how each pumpkin tells its own story. We were very excited to finally be able to meet with our big buddies again! After so many Mondays away from school, we haven't had many opportunities yet. We were officially assigned to specific buddies and are looking forward to getting to know them. Our big buddies do speak French, but we started out with a get-to-know-you activity in English, just to break the ice and make everyone feel more comfortable. On the "WE" side of our page, we wrote what we have in common. On the "ME" side, we wrote things that we learned only pertain to one of us. In our "house teams" system, Madame was noticing that we were getting a little too competitive and it was having a bit of a damper on the community feel so now instead of just working toward individual victory, we are also working toward a group goal. We brainstormed what we wanted our group prize to be and then took a vote. The idea of all playing a game of Minecraft Education together was the winner! (Madame says that we all have free access to Minecraft Education through the school district, in case any parents are wondering about it). Our current goal is to reach a collective 500 points to earn our prize. (But shhhhh!...depending on how things go, Madame may reduce this number if it's taking us too long to reach it.) The great thing is that Madame now gets to sneak in double-digit addition with multiple numbers as we regularly figure out our collective total. And speaking of community, Madame has been so impressed by the way we have been rallying together, cheering for each other when we reach our reading goals, supporting one another when we're sad, and helping one another when needed. One day this week, someone accidentally dropped the entire box of perler beads on the floor. Hundreds, if not thousands, of tiny beads went flying everywhere. But without missing a beat, half the class was on their hands and knees helping to clean up the mess. Madame didn't even have to ask. A frustrating moment for one person turned into a heartwarming moment. We have been talking about Halloween vocabulary this week and have been getting the song "C'est l'Halloween" stuck in our heads on repeat. Today, we took the time to write in our journals about Halloween and some of us got really creative with our ideas! Extra photos...
We enjoyed our first "nature walk" this week! Madame says that there's so much we can learn from using our imaginations in the outdoors - French vocabulary galore, lessons on safety, teamwork, resiliency, pushing our limits, and above all, an appreciation for the beauty that surrounds us and how to be good stewards of it. Some of us even had a lesson on poop identification when Addie clearly found some bear poop! We investigated and determined that it wasn't fresh so we didn't need to be overly concerned. Madame likes to bring her ukulele to the forest for her reinvented version of "Down by the Bay"... changed to "In the forest" in French (Dans la forêt). We had fun singing silly rhymes about bees with sunburns and flies wearing diapers. We all did a little French vocabulary scavenger hunt and looked for items along our walk. Interestingly, we had a lot of trouble finding water and realized that's because it's the driest October that Madame can ever remember. So we cheated and found water in our waterbottles. ;-) Limbo!! In French, we continue to work through our individual reading programs. We all have our own book bags with our unique levelled material inside them. So when our big buddies come to read with us in the mornings, we can grab our bags and head into the hallway with them to practice what we've been working on. Whenever we feel like we've become experts at our material, we sit down and read it through with Madame and if she thinks we're ready, she lets us honk a bike horn to get everyone's attention. Then we all stop what we're doing and sing a special celebratory song, which is often followed by spontaneous hugs or high-fives. Our reading levels are never posted anywhere in the classroom and Madame reminds us often that we are "running our own race"... it's all about doing our best with what we have and continuing to push through, even when it's hard. We've been learning some Fall vocabulary and practiced our sentence-writing this week with some of our words. We are getting more confident at using our starter words, and are working hard at putting periods at the end of our sentences, capital letters at the beginning, and spaces between words. We began a directed draw of a pumpkin (une citrouille) this week but instead of just colouring it orange like a typical pumpkin, Madame taught us about how to use lines and shapes in art to make creative designs. In each section of our pumpkins, we drew our own unique designs with lines and shapes. We have just begun learning about primary and secondary colours and will get to use our expanded colour theory knowledge next week to finish off our pumpkin art. For this week's Friday team challenge, Madame gave us the task of using only primary colours to try to create a rainbow of colours. As it turns out, purple is very hard to create well. But we all did an amazing job on this challenge and every team was awarded full points! In Math, we became more familiar with the 100s chart on Tuesday with a special Thanksgiving turkey surprise. Most of us enjoyed this search and find activity, which also helped us to review our reading and colour vocabulary, but others admitted that it was really tricky! Many of us are still flipping our numbers (we see "21" as "12", for example) and others just aren't yet quite familiar with the patterns in the hundreds chart. But Madame says not to worry...we will do more activities like this throughout the year and by June, we should be feeling much more comfortable with how it all works. We also did some unplanned Math this week when a group of boys built a couple of big structures out of plastic straws. Madame had us count the squares on one side of a structure and make addition equations with them, but then we also had a little informal introduction to multiplication. Madame assured us that we don't need to be learning multiplication until at least Grade 3 so if it's confusing or tricky, we don't need to stress about it. But some of us caught on really well to the concept! Extra photos...
In honour of Terry Fox, today was also... "Neon Day"??... We're not sure how the two fit together, but we absolutely loved getting our neon on! It's been a Terry Fox theme all week and the French song "Je cours comme Terry" has been running on repeat in our heads. ...Maybe because Madame keeps playing it as our clean-up song and we all roll our eyes at her and say, "Madaaaaaaame!" when she randomly starts singing it and dancing throughout the day. We started the week by brainstorming what we already know about Terry Fox and we enjoyed looking on Google Maps to figure out where, exactly, he ran in comparison with where we live. We've also been reading a French book about Terry each day and becoming more familiar with the vocabulary. We talked about a big word: "perseverance"... what does the word mean, and how did Terry persevere? "Terry kept on going, even when it was hard." Then we thought about some things that we really want to persevere at. Madame was secretly hoping we would write things like "French reading" and "Math equations", but she accepted our answers of "building a Minecraft mansion" and "doing a cartwheel", too. ;-) Hey, as long as we're understanding what it means to keep going, even when it's tough. All of this talk about Terry Fox culminated in our big run today! And we all did keep going, even when it was tough... and hot! Some of us dedicated our run to someone specific, and others just decided to run to help everyone in our fight for a cure for cancer. Thanksgiving is also this weekend! We took some time to read a really funny Thanksgiving story that belonged to Mme Wear when she was a child. It was a good lesson about taking care of our books because young Mme Wear scribbled all over some of the pages. Don't ever do that to your books, kids! Then we wrote our own little Thanksgiving accordion books about the things we're thankful for. And guess what?? ...there's a super catchy French Thanksgiving song, too! Wahoo! The weather continues to be outstanding so we took our Math outside this week. Grade 1s drew number lines up to 10, filled a 10-frame with at least two different nature items, and then made it into an equation. Meanwhile, Grade 2s did number lines all the way up to 20! They showed how to make 20 by putting different groups of objects together, wrote out equations, and then had some extra mathematical challenges thrown at them by Madame, relating to their equations. It was a lot of work, but there were no complaints and they handled it very well. Extra photos... Beating the heat with a cool, outdoor vent that we found...
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