We may be in the last full week of school, but the learning hasn't stopped! For the most part, we've been sticking to our regular literacy/reading routines and Math curriculum. We've been challenging ourselves with more difficult books, and have been enjoying experimenting with problem solving questions and creating shapes with geoboards. On Monday, we went on a field trip to the Pitt Meadows library and learned a lot about the history of the library, about our community, and about all of the different things that we can borrow from the library (ukuleles, telescopes, spheros, DVDs, CDs, etc.) We also talked about how if we join the summer reading club, we can get a REAL medal at the end of the summer! On our Hoffman Park walk this week, we visited a different area of the forest and discovered huckleberries! We talked about examining the leaves of the bushes, as well as the size and colour of the berries and how they are clustered, in order to determine whether or not they are edible berries. But we also learned that we should NEVER eat any berries without first talking to an adult, even if we're pretty sure that we know what kind of berries they are. We should also NEVER eat mushrooms in the forest! After we noticed one huckleberry bush, we suddenly started seeing them everywhere! It was a veritable huckleberry feast, with students carting back entire handfuls of them. One student in our class even went back to the forest after school to pick some more and then brought them home to make some huckleberry/strawberry jam that he shared with us today! Soooo yummy! Continuing with our outdoor theme, Mme brought in pocket knives this week for us to try whittling some sticks. We went to Spirit Square to find a collection of sticks and had fun trying to carve off the bark. The sentiment was: "This is really hard work, but it's really fun!" We learned about how to hold a knife properly and how to keep it away from our bodies so that we don't slip and cut ourselves. Most importantly, we learned that it's a tool that needs to be respected and treated with great care and attention. Our Big Buddy class has spent the past several weeks working on a cardboard arcade that they wanted to share with us. They did a great job building their games and we had so much fun trying them all out! But when Mme Van Sickle said that we would be going to see their "arcade", most of us didn't know what that word even meant. The world is definitely changing! This was our last week of our classroom economy, and therefore the last week to buy items at "le magasin" (the store). It has been so fun to see the growth in the students' financial literacy! Instead of them coming up with a bunch of change in their hands, asking what they can buy with it, many of them are now counting out their change all by themselves and pointing to what they are able to purchase based on the price tags. One of the important pieces of the classroom economy has been our charitable donations. Every week, before we buy anything for ourselves, we give at least one day's wages (a nickel) to charity. The charity that the class decided to support this year was Children's Hospital. Through extra donations, we've managed to collect $23.70! Mme Van Sickle will be writing a cheque this week to the Hospital. One special little girl in our class decided to spend all of her final earnings on charity rather than buying anything for herself at the store. She got to wear the "kindness cape" (la cape de gentillesse - it sounds so much better in English!) What a beautiful little heart!
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