Buckle up! It's February!... aka the month with the most holidays/special days to recognize... aka the shortest month of the year. FIRST... we had to finish off our "Carnaval" festivities. We learned that during this festive time in Quebec, there are usually several large snowball fights. And since hands-on learning is the best kind of learning, we did the obvious thing and had a snowball fight! Next holiday... Chinese New Year! We enjoyed learning about this 2-week celebration that involves amazing food, fun and our favourite - red pockets of money! We learned that the Chinese New Year celebration is actually tied to the first new moon in February, which is when the traditional lantern festival closes off the holiday. We have been tracking the moon and made special lanterns for the "Year of the Tiger" to bring home on the day of the new moon. All of this talk about the moon has had us learning more about this large object in our night sky. We found out that the moon orbits the earth every 29 days and that it doesn't actually give off any light of its own... it just reflects light from the sun onto the earth, like the way a mirror would bounce light onto an object. And the last special day of this week was Groundhog Day! We read the story of the "marmotte" and watched a live news feed about Wiarton Willie, our Canadian groundhog, to see if he saw his shadow. But Madame really feels we should get our money back for this groundhog ceremony because he didn't even come out of his box to see his shadow... a "groundhog whisperer" just knocked on his box and ASKED him if it would be an early spring. *insert eye roll* Thankfully, he apparently said "yes". Let's hope Wiarton and his whisperer are correct! Learning about Groundhog Day gave us the opportunity to talk about how shadows are formed and how they are blocked from view. We learned that when the sun shines directly on our groundhog friend, his shadow appears. But when a cloud blocks the sun's rays, the shadow disappears. Now we just need a sunny day to go examine our own shadows. If Wiarton Willie's prediction is correct, hopefully there will be sunny days coming soon! And in non-holiday news, we've been learning about our 5 senses. This week's focus was on the sense of touch, which gave us the chance to talk about various French adjectives - hard, soft, rough, smooth, pointy... We have begun learning how to include adjectives in our sentences and are starting to sound out words all on our own! Today was a big day for some of us who became first-time home buyers! For the whopping price of $0.50, some of us chose to forego extra treats and trinkets and use our hard-earned cash to purchase our homes instead. (Goodbye, weekly rent payments!) One student even bought a 2nd investment property already, as well! (Hello, residual income!) When we buy our home, Madame puts a little red dot sticker on our cubby bins. Green dots indicate that we have purchased an investment property. Extra pics...
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