Happy April Fool's! Or as they say in France, "Poisson d'Avril!"... which yes, if you understand some basic French, you will realize that says "April fish". In France, the big April 1st tradition in elementary school is to stick paper fish to your friends' backs. Madame got to experience this tradition first-hand when she taught in France for a couple of years and it was very entertaining to see the normally very strict school culture "let go" a little and let the kids be silly. Madame definitely loves a good silly holiday, so here we are... The joke was clearly on her... Spring has sprung! The evidence has been all around us this week! And Madame sent us on an evidence-collecting mission with REAL cameras. We talked a lot about how to respect these expensive pieces of equipment and learned things like how to focus and how to get close up to our subject for the best photos. We had so much fun with this task that many of us chose to use the cameras all afternoon rather than going off to play. The next day, we took a look at our photos and analyzed what made the great ones stand out so much. What techniques did we use? We are looking forward to more photography lessons, but here are some of Madame's top picks of the photos that we, the students, took on our own! Some of them are pretty impressive! ...the world through children's eyes... Our world is so beautiful that we really want to work on keeping it that way. As we launch into April, we are gearing up for Earth Day by learning about some favourite "Earth Heroes". This week's spotlight was on Greta Thunberg. We couldn't believe that she's only 19 years old and has done so much to help the planet! We were inspired and talked about some things that we can do to make a difference for our world, beginning with using less water. We set up our own little water "cistern" in the school courtyard to collect rain water for watering plants, rather than using fresh water. We learned that we'll need to put a lid on it during sunny days so that the water doesn't evaporate and disappear! We've also been talking about electricity. We learned first about static electricity. We had a lot of fun creating static electricity by rubbing a balloon on our heads and were especially surprised to see how the electrically-charged balloon stuck to the wall! We also took off our shoes and tried shuffling around the room to create a "zap!" when we touched each other. We also talked about current electricity and all of the different places where we could find it in the classroom. But after learning that electricity comes from power plants that pollute the air, we brainstormed some ways that we could reduce our use of electricity: turning off lights/radio/TV when we're not in a room, unplugging some devices when we're not using them, etc. Another way to help the Earth is to plant trees, flowers and food. We each got to plant a kidney bean in a clear, plastic cup that we decorated. (Yes, plastic...it doesn't fit well with Earth month, but it allows us to see the roots of the plant as they grow... we will recycle it afterwards!) We're so excited to watch them grow! In classroom economy news, housing prices plummeted this week due to the limited returns on investment projected for the rest of this 2022 school year. This is good news for those interested in breaking into the market or for those just looking to add to their investment property portfolio. There was a rush to buy new homes and many of us are now enjoying a steady residual income stream. There were not enough properties (cubby baskets) to go around so Madame let us create some imaginary properties and name our renters. Most of us got a great laugh out of naming our siblings as the renters because we loved the thought of our siblings having to "pay" us rent each week. (To clarify, the imaginary rent payments will actually come from Madame so nobody should be insisting that their siblings empty their piggy banks for them!) ;-) Extra pics...
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