Wow, we did a lot of things this week! First and foremost, we finally got to perform the Christmas play for our parents/grandparents/special people that we created as a class. We put so much work into practicing this and Madame is so, so proud of us! Afterward, we got to bring our loved ones back to the classroom for a quick game of dreidels! Thank you to everyone for being such good sports, even in a cramped space! We were also so excited to receive some driftwood from Mme Towne (a former teacher at PME) who very kindly gathered it, herself, from the beach by her new home on Bowen Island for us. We enlisted the help of our big buddies and had fun painting special Christmas decorations on the wood. But it wasn't all about Christmas and Hannukah this week... we also learned about Kwanzaa! We located Africa on Google Earth and figured out where it is in relation to where we are in Canada. The 7 principles of Kwanzaa were quite an in-depth concept to grasp, but we enjoyed learning about the symbols that go along with the holiday, particularly the colours (red, black and green), the kinara, and the unity cup. We used what we learned about the colours to create our own unity cups! Some of our friends were in not one, but TWO, play productions this week! We loved watching the Lunchbox Theatre performance of Beauty and the Beast, and some of us are now very interested in signing up to participate in the Spring. Bravo to Adriana and Addie from our class who did an amazing job in the play! We also had fun checking out the Grade 6/7 "Entrepreneur Fair" and all the amazing assortment of products that were available! Some of us got all of our Christmas shopping done here. ;-) And to thank our big buddies for everything they do with us, we made them special Baby Yoda Christmas cards. Well, some of us made Baby Yodas... certain drawings morphed into Christmas aliens and other assorted images. But as Madame always says to us, "It's YOUR art. You get to do it however you want!" We were so pleased when we went to give our cards to our buddies that they ended up having cards for us, too! And then there was the Space Centre, of course!!! If you asked most of us what our favourite part of the trip was, the answer would be "riding the school bus"! But there were so many other neat things to see, do, and learn! Extra photos...
It was a short week, but it was filled with learning about various cultural celebrations for the holidays. We started by making piñatas to recognize one of the ways that Christmas is celebrated in Mexico. We went with an easy plastic cup version of a piñata this time rather than the messy paper maché version. And it turns out that it's just as exciting when the candy comes out of a cup! We learned that in Haiti, children put their shoes on the porch for Santa to fill with presents so we very excitedly placed our shoes on the door mat one day before recess to see if "Madame père Noël" would come. It turns out "he" did! (It was a very sugar-filled week...heh.) One of our favourite new songs is the Jewish "dreidel" song, making up part of Hannukah celebrations. Click here to view some other awesome, catchy versions of this song. We couldn't just sing about making dreidels out of clay without trying to make our OWN out of clay! For those of us who did this activity with Madame last year, this year's clay is actual air dry clay rather than the plasticine that did not hold up well last year. We're excited to paint our dreidels next week! But we also took the opportunity to play with some real, pre-made dreidels and learn how to play the game. First, a Hebrew lesson... We used nickels for the game, which also gave us an opportunity to continue recognizing the coins and practicing counting by 5s. We even got to perform our play for the French Kindergarten/Grade 1 class and we did a fabulous job! Madame brought in a hot new toy this week - a circuit maker! She plunked it down in front of us and told us she wasn't going to help... we had to see if we could figure it out on our own! It took us a little while, but soon we were creating all kinds of things - disco lights, music, and even helicopter toys... often by improvising on our own without looking at any picture directions. We also got a sneak peak of our big buddies' entrepreneur fair creations this week! It was fun to check out all of their creative ideas and some of us even made some purchases.
There was a lot of excitement this week with one of our regular school days cancelled due to snow! We were so happy that the snow lasted for the rest of the week so that we also got to play in it with our school friends, and even take a walk to Hoffman Park to play in it among the trees. We tried to predict whether there would be MORE snow or LESS snow in the forest... and why? But before we even got there, we got a little sidetracked by the hills at Spirit Square. ;-) It has been a week of reviewing and entrenching various concepts. In Math, we have been getting much stronger at counting by 5s and exchanging coins! Since it is now officially December (whaaaaat?!), we read an English book all about the different ways people celebrate holidays at this time of year, from Hanukkah, to Kwanzaa, to St. Lucia's Day... And we learned that in countries like Mexico and Haiti they celebrate Christmas, but with different types of traditions than the ones we have here in Canada. We decided that as a class, it would be fun to try to celebrate in as many ways as we can to honour those different holidays and traditions! But to kick off our next couple of weeks of holiday extravaganza, we began by writing a letter in French to Santa and mailing it! We're really hopeful that he will write back to us! The walk to the mailbox turned out to be quite the trek! In the spirit of our snowy weather, our Friday challenge this week was to make a sled that could slide down a "hill", using some materials Madame had around the classroom. At first some of us had trouble speaking nicely to each other when we were sharing our ideas, but disagreements are natural in life so we practiced some polite phrases that we could use. After this lesson, we all seemed to work really well together and came up with some very creative projects! We had so much fun sliding the sleds down the table "hill", timing their speed, graphing our results, and switching up our design slightly before trying it on the hill again. We talked about how there were many variables for the results we got... whether or not the person releasing the sled gave it a little push, whether they started appropriately behind the "start line", whether the person timing the slide pressed the buttons at exactly the right time, etc. Our results could change a lot just based on those factors. We decided that because of that, it was too difficult to assess a winner and everyone got 10 points for design and an extra point for speaking politely to one another! Woohoo! Later, we took our sleds outside to see how they would work on the metal slide. We noticed that the ones with felt or cardboard bottoms went really slow and even got stuck because of the friction with the water and snow. But the sleds with plastic at the bottom slid really well! Extra pics...
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