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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