It's Olympics time! We had fun looking up Beijing, China on Google Earth and discovering how far away it is from our school. We were shocked to hear that our whole, giant country of Canada only has 38 million people in it, while China has 1.4 BILLION people!! We wondered about what the Olympic rings mean and ended up having a great discussion about the symbols that we see all around us and how they all have some kind of meaning. In the case of the Olympic rings, we learned that they represent the 5 continents and how the athletes come together from around the world to compete. Gym class has been extra fun this week with an Olympics theme, and we were even inspired to create our very own guinea pig olympics! It all began with a plan... Using items from around the classroom, we came up with loads of ideas of obstacles or "events" to create for our guinea pigs. We presented our ideas to the class and then attempted to bring our visions to life. Most of us didn't stick too closely to our plan in the end, but we improvised with what we had and were generally excited about the results. And finally, after all our paint and glue had dried a couple of days later, we corralled off a large section of the classroom and set up our stations... and threw in a bunch of extra stuff, just for fun. There was only one thing left to do... add in the guinea pigs!... We can't say they were overly enthusiastic about many of our creations, and we never did manage to get them into the ball pit despite our very best efforts, but we still loved seeing them run around on the floor and Madame says we did an awesome job of sitting quietly and respectfully so as not to scare them. Here is our video montage of the experience... In French, we have begun a more in-depth focus on our digraphs (two letters together that make one sound). This week's focus was on the sound "on". We practiced reading words by sounding them out, one sound at a time, and then we brought those words to life with an outdoor relay race for the items depicted in the words. This not only helps embed the vocabulary and the sounds, but it also helps us learn French gaming words ("we won", "your turn", "try again", "good game"...). And an added bonus are the social skills of learning how to accept defeat and work as a team. And now that we are nearing the end of Term 2, we are beginning to practice writing out our first AND last names with a combination of uppercase and lowercase letters. Some of us have really long last names so Madame doesn't expect us to fill all the practice lines, but we are beginning to become familiar with how our full names look and are even choosing occasionally to do more work than expected! (We love using Madame's special markers on the wipe-able sleeves). Some of us are even excitedly telling Madame about how we are writing out our full names on other things outside of school "without even LOOKING!" :-) All of our counting in Math is leading us to practice addition of multiple numbers. Some of us are really catching on to the idea of dividing items into groups for more efficient counting, then adding those groups together. Extra photos...
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