Happy Spring Break!! We definitely went out with a "bang"! So much happened this week that it's going to be difficult to condense it all! It was "la semaine de la francophonie" (Francophone week - a week celebrating French-speaking culture around the world), so the whole school enjoyed a variety of celebratory activities! Each class took on a different French-speaking country to research. Ours was Burundi!...a tiny African country that is rated among the poorest countries in the world. We learned to identify what continent it was on, where it was located in Africa, and many interesting facts about it. Some of us tried to replicate how the people there carry things on their heads. We realized it wasn't as easy as they made it look in the documentary video! Other fun French-inspired activities throughout the week included the poutine truck, a French read-aloud from the librarian, and not one... not two... but THREE assemblies! We celebrated the different French-speaking countries around the world for the first assembly, learned about Métis culture and dance in the second, and for the third, we had our favourite - a special visit from "the Maple Man"! Some volunteers came from PMSS on Thursday to help run outdoor games in French, as well. We played pétanque (bocce), had a potato sack race, battled it out in a game of Capture the Flag, and did "egg" and spoon races. The firefighters even joined us! The PAC also treated us to a schoolwide French-themed picnic with croissants, cheese, grapes, and sparkling grape juice. And later, we participated in a "Tintamarre" - an Acadian tradition of marching around making noise with homemade instruments and other noisemakers. We had fun making the instruments ourselves from random materials we brought from home or found around the classroom. And in other cultural-related news, we had a First Nations-inspired drumming circle in the forest this week. With permission from Lilly, the Katzie composer of the song we learned, we did a French land acknowledgment and then enjoyed playing and singing her song in Hul'q'umi'num'. Afterward, we had a blast playing in a new forest location! A few weeks ago, Mme Kate's class did a random act of kindness for us by making each of us some special drawings. Our only instruction was to pay it forward! Well, with everything going on in February, it took us awhile to actually complete the task of paying it forward. We finally did it this week! We all did our best work on a pop-up surprise heart monster drawing and brought them to Ms. Sandhu's K/1 class to share the love. They were so pleased to receive our gifts! And finally, in Science, we loved doing a Skittles experiment with water. We hypothesized about which temperature of water would make the colours from the Skittles bleed the most/the fastest. Most of us guessed that it would be the hot water and to be honest, this is what Madame expected, as well. But strangely, the cold water won! This was a great chance to talk about variables in Science that can change our expected results: - the "cold" water was not that cold - it was straight from the tap - Madame didn't pour equal amounts of water on each plate - she accidentally over-filled the cold water plate and probably under-filled the hot water plate We brainstormed modifications that we could make to have the experiment be more accurate: measuring out the exact amounts of water before pouring them onto the plates, making sure the plates were laying completely flat, etc. Then we tried redoing the hot water plate with these things in mind. Sure enough, the hot water plate was twice as fast the second time. Extra photos... "Look, Madame! We're both wearing a nickel!" Nathan's 3D perler bead masterpiece!
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