Our Math lessons this week have been brought to you by the number "5"... skip-counting by 5s, that is. It's all part of Madame's master plan to slowly introduce us to (or review, for those who have been in her class before) how to identify and count nickels, dimes, etc. so that we can soon have our own class store up and running. We have been singing Madame's skip-counting parody, inspired by Pink's famous song "So what"... Madame also had us work with our big buddies at the beginning of the week to do an assessment of our knowledge of Canadian coins and their values. Many of us will repeat this assessment in June to see how much our knowledge has improved. We've been learning a fun game with coins, too, which helps us practice "trading up" from coins with smaller values to larger ones. We can't forget about patterns, though! We discovered that they're not just in the clapping rhythms we practiced last week, but also in the actual songs we sing and listen to. In fact, one of the things that makes a great song is having repeated elements. And hey, why not dance to those songs while we work on identifying the patterns?? We had such a special visit this week from an author named Wendy Maxwell! She wrote the play that Madame's class performed last year, as well as a play that we will all begin learning in the New Year. She also inspired Madame's use of gestures for teaching a second language. And she came to visit US!!! Madame was easily the most excited of anyone to have her in our classroom. Mme Wendy insisted that we speak in French exclusively the entire time she was with us - either speak in French or don't speak at all. We also had to respond to questions in full sentences only. This was a difficult exercise for some of us but it's amazing how we can push ourselves to do hard things when we really try. And a big "congratulations" to Kennedy! Madame has been teaching for about 10 years and every year, she challenges the class to find a word without a vowel. She always promises that she'll give $10 to anyone who can actually find a word that doesn't contain one. (Abbreviations, onomatopoeia, and words with only a 'y' - like dry or why - don't count. The 'y' in those words acts like a vowel with the sound 'i'). Madame was convinced this was an impossible task, but Kennedy and her dad actually managed to find a word. Who has heard of a crwth?? It is apparently a Welsh instrument. Thank you, Kennedy and Kennedy's dad, for inspiring a geography lesson about Wales! Madame is nothing if not true to her word... On our forest walk this week, we were thrilled when we noticed that the big Douglas Fir tree in Spirit Square has started to be decorated for Christmas. We sang Christmas songs the whole rest of the way to the park. Extra photos...
In Math, we have been learning about patterns and all the many places we can find them and the many ways we can make them. This week we began learning about how patterns can also be found in MUSIC! We began by learning the French terms for musical notation, as well as how to "read" and clap/tap the rhythms accurately. Madame was so pleased with how enthusiastic we were about this exercise! Many of us even asked to read more rhythms during snack time. After we got the hang of some simple notation, it was time to try writing some of our own! We were asked to work in partners to create a repeating rhythm pattern that we would perform for the class. We started by simply clapping the rhythms, but then we learned that we could actually use our bodies as percussion instruments to perform those same rhythms. What kinds of different sounds could we make, just by stomping, slapping, snapping, bopping different parts of our bodies? The results were pretty awesome. ;-) And did you know people actually do body percussion professionally? We loved watching a video of the group "Stomp" doing their own incredible rhythms. There are also videos of them making amazing music using nothing but every day objects. For our team challenge this week, we made our own musical instruments out of recycled materials and then tried playing a simple rhythm. Most of us even took turns playing different parts, just like a real musical group, so that one person played the quarter notes, another the eighth notes, etc. In French, we continue to practice the differences between all the many ways to write the sound "é". This is a lot to wrap our hands around, especially for Grade 1s! But we are beginning to catch on. Madame took words from our upcoming Christmas play and had us do a word sort, based on the rules for when to use each "é" sound. We also did a "treasure hunt" within a passage from our play to look for and colour those same sounds. And we finished the week by writing our own journal entries using many of the "é" words and rules we have been learning about! In Science, we are wrapping up our little inquiry into spiders by creating our very own information and identification booklet about spiders local to our area. We have enjoyed learning more details about these creatures and some of us have been digging through spider books during our free time to look for more information. Thursday's nature walk was another opportunity to go on a spider hunt and use our newfound knowledge to try to identify the ones we found! Madame questions the accuracy of some of our findings, but we had fun, anyway. ;-) And Madame is enjoying the fact that now when we find a spider in the classroom, instead of screaming, someone yells, "Quick! Take a picture of it so we can identify it!" We read an interesting book this week called "Puppy in my Head", all about how there's a puppy that lives inside our heads that sometimes gets overly excited or scared, and we need to find ways to help it calm down. We talked about how everyone has an animal in their heads, even grown-ups! Then we drew what we decided were the animals living in each of our own heads and strategized as to how we can calm down our own animals. Extra photos...
Today was a solemn day of remembrance. We did an amazing job with our "land acknowledgment" at the assembly, but for anyone who didn't get a chance to see it in the gym, here it is as performed in our classroom (where Madame could get a better sound recording). After our assembly today, we walked over to the cenotaph in Spirit Square and had our own moment of "silence", with all of us standing around it while Madame read out the French version of "In Flanders Fields". This French version of the poem also appeared on our art this week. Our big buddies helped us with a classic paper-glueing poppy craft that we affixed to a world map with the poem (copy-pasted many times) as an overlay. If "a poppy is for peace", this art helps us to remember how we wish for peace across the world. And did you know that "Indigenous Remembrance Day" is on November 8th? Their contributions are significant because, despite the fact that this land was stripped from their ancestors by explorers and later accorded the name "Canada", these brave Indigenous soldiers fought to protect this country as their own. We learned about a special monument in Ottawa to commemorate their contributions and were able to do a replica colouring page of the monument. Another holiday that is fast approaching is Christmas! We decided to write our own class play for the occasion! First, we analyzed another play, looking for characters (les personnages), setting (le cadre), and the plot/problem (le problème). Once we had a good idea of what to look for with these story elements, we were ready to create our own! And Madame says that she's actually really impressed with the plot line that we created! She took all of our ideas and typed them up into a 2-page play that we have begun practicing. There are a LOT of words to learn, which is amazing for our vocabulary (or so says Madame!), but is a complex learning curve for us. We are working hard, though, and are excited to see how it all comes together! We continue to practice new French sounds each week and review old ones. This week we have landed on the sound "é", and we're just going to hang out here for a couple of weeks. Why? ... because this seems to be THE favourite sound of the French! There are so many ways to make "é" with two letters. We are learning about when to use each version and are practicing listening to one-syllable and multi-syllable words that Madame dictates as we transcribe them onto our individual whiteboards. We like assigning ourselves points for each one we get correct, even though the points count for nothing. ;-) Extra photos...
It was a positively friiiiightening week! (...in more ways than one, if you ask Madame). ;-) We were thrilled to have our PME Halloween costume parade tradition back after a long hiatus due to COVID! It was so fun getting the chance to see everyone's costumes! We also loved having the opportunity to see our big buddies perform Halloween dances in the gym! There was even a super spoooooky Science lesson where we made hypotheses (a new word for most of us!) about which type of ice would produce the biggest reaction when placed inside a glass or a bowl full of juice... normal ice cubes, ice cubes made from Coke, or dry ice? Most of us thought that the Coke cubes would produce the biggest reaction because Coke is fizzy and we've heard so many tales of the explosive reactions of Mentos and Coke. But despite all the hype, the Coke cubes were about as dull as dishwater. BUT... the dry ice... now THAT was exciting...! Clearly, we were going to be tired after some late-night trick-or-treating, so we welcomed the opportunity to come dressed in our PJs the day after Halloween! And even better, Madame let us build forts and spend all day working, eating, and playing in them! It was also the school's official "Home Reading" kick-off on pajama day! Even though most of our class has already been doing home reading since September, we enjoyed the excitement and camaraderie of getting together with all of the other French primary classes and listening to our principal, Mme Simon, and our librarian, Mme St-Amour, read us a story. Since we've had so many questions about spiders lately, we continued our inquiry into them this week! We watched a video clip about the differences between insects and spiders and why spiders are therefore NOT insects. We labelled the parts of a spider and then got to go on an actual spider hunt! We managed to catch some specimens to bring back to the classroom to examine. (No spiders were harmed in the making of this lesson. All spiders were promptly returned to the wild.) ;-) We noted some interesting observations... like that spiders seemed to be easy to find along the walls of the school, especially in corners. Why is that? There were several specimen to examine and we sorted through them to separate the insects from the spiders, identifying the reasons why some would be classified as insects and the others as spiders. Then we used our trusty friend Google to look up what kinds of spiders we have in BC. We compared the specimens in our jars to the pictures from Google and were able to get a vague idea of what we had in our jars. The most surprising for Madame was... a black widow? Seriously? Nooooo...! We don't have black widows here, do we?? Even Madame is learning things. The fact is that we DO have black widows here (surprise!), but Madame was quite certain this wasn't one of them, even if it did seem to be the best match with the photos that we had. She dug deeper at home and brought us some more photos the next day. We were able to identify the curious specimen as a brown-legged crab spider (scientific name: coriarachne brunneipes...we had fun trying to pronounce that one!). We all agreed that this appeared to be a much more likely match than the black widow. But it's not all about Google. We're bringing back traditional learning, too, with BOOK research! We enjoyed spending time looking through a number of books about spiders, putting sticky notes in pages that sparked questions for us, and then sharing what we found with the class. And continuing on the spider theme, our Friday team challenge was all about creating webs out of different materials and measuring their tensile strength. The tensile strength of a material is the maximum amount of stress it can stand before breaking. Our challenge: find out which spider web material would hold the greatest amount of rock "spiders". Whichever material held the most would have the greatest tensile strength. We tested 3 different materials: 1. yarn 2. uncooked spaghetti 3. decorative spider webs The idea was that we would work together to create webs using these materials, being careful to reproduce the same web patterns with each of our 3 materials to ensure a scientifically accurate test. And when Madame looks back on that idea, she laughs and laughs at her fool-hearted naivety to think that it would actually work. It turns out that just weaving the yarn around the loom was challenge enough. ...Forget keeping track of our actual pattern in order to reproduce it delicately with single spaghetti strands. Bahaha! We dumped spaghetti in clumps on the looms instead. So... our tests were not scientifically sound, but we had fun doing them. And were able to discuss later why our results may have been skewed. ;-) Team points for everyone for such a great effort and for really pitching in to help with clean up! Extra photos
|
Archives
June 2024
Categories |