It was "Tacky Tourist Day" today, and we got our tacky on! Social Studies this week was a continuation of the "choose your own adventure" topic of volcanos. Madame hadn't planned to talk about volcanoes at all this year, but we were so enthusiastic about them that it has proven to be an excellent conduit for teaching inquiry processes. Madame brought in pictures of her trek up Mt. Vesuvius, and some pictures of her husband's hike up Mt. St. Helen's. We were fascinated to learn that Mt. St. Helen's erupted when many of our moms and dads were born and that our grandparents could see ash falling from the sky in Pitt Meadows. Just like with the narwhals inquiry, we used a word web to gather our questions and ideas. We poured over books on volcanoes, many of us even spending our free time looking through pictures. During quiet reading, Madame had us look through books with a partner and pick our favourite pages, or the ones we were most curious about. Most of us begged to share more than just one page and we were on the edge of our seats as Madame read through the content and explained what was going on. But one of our favourite parts of this inquiry was creating our own volcano. We were pretty surprised when Madame handed us all a piece of newspaper and told us that our job was to crumple it into a ball! We stacked all our balls around a bottle inside a sushi platter, secured them, and our volcano began to take shape. Not all of us were excited about the idea of getting our hands messy in the paper maché, but thankfully some brave volunteers stepped up! It took 2 days for our creation to dry, but we were finally able to add some paint to make it look authentic with trees, rivers, lakes, and even some snow. We decided to name it Mont Panthère, after our school mascot. And then came the best part... the explosion! (Madame forgot to actually stir the red food coloring before pouring in the vinegar so our lava wasn't very red. We tried it a 2nd time with much better results but we didn't manage to catch that on camera.) We also learned this week that the lava rocks we use all the time for our Math activities ACTUALLY come from real, hardened lava. We have continued to practice the relationship between addition and subtraction this week and are getting faster at using our fingers and manipulatives to subtract numbers. ![]() We have also been using a lot of math skills with our classroom economy. Some of us like to sit and count our change every day and even make multiple trips back and forth to Madame to trade our quarter for 5 nickels, then trade the nickels for dimes, then exchange it all back to a quarter again, just because we can. All of this playing is actually really important learning! We also had our own version of "Property Wars" going on in class this week. McKinnley had been saving all of her change and suddenly decided she was going to put frivolous prizes aside and really dive into the landlord business to make some serious residual income. She bought up 16 "properties" and upgraded a few of them to mansions. Now her imaginary renters will be paying her some handsome sums in rent each week while she sits back, relaxes and does nothing but watch the cash roll in. Cha-ching! Her bold move sparked a chain reaction and students were chomping at the bit to buy up their own investment properties. Thankfully the bullish market did not cause a sudden uptick in housing prices so home ownership can still remain a dream...nay, a reality...for even the average income earner. (Obviously this is not the Lower Mainland). We've decided to start keeping track of how many properties we own by adding colour-coded stickers to our home base. A green sticker on our home base indicates a regular house that we've purchased (yields $0.05 in rent each week) and red indicates a mansion (yields $0.10 in rent each week). Instead of going to the forest this week, we ventured to Mitchell Rd Park. We had a great time playing basketball, kicking around a soccer ball, and playing on the playground. Madame even let us climb in a big tree! She laid down some ground rules first...most importantly that nobody was allowed to climb the tree until she got to climb it! She tied a rope to the highest point where we were allowed to go and then let us take turns attempting the climb. It turns out that climbing trees is a lot harder than it looks! But it is also an amazing way to develop strong "gross grasp" hand skills - what we need for holding a pencil to write and for carrying out other fine motor tasks (doing up buttons, tying shoe laces, etc). It also presents us with an opportunity to develop our stamina, courage, determination, and a sense of our personal limits. On the way back from the park, we did a mini hike through the "forest" and out to Harris Rd. We made some fun discoveries like fuzzy caterpillars and a city of bird houses! Extra photos from the week...
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