In Math, we have been learning about patterns and all the many places we can find them and the many ways we can make them. This week we began learning about how patterns can also be found in MUSIC! We began by learning the French terms for musical notation, as well as how to "read" and clap/tap the rhythms accurately. Madame was so pleased with how enthusiastic we were about this exercise! Many of us even asked to read more rhythms during snack time. After we got the hang of some simple notation, it was time to try writing some of our own! We were asked to work in partners to create a repeating rhythm pattern that we would perform for the class. We started by simply clapping the rhythms, but then we learned that we could actually use our bodies as percussion instruments to perform those same rhythms. What kinds of different sounds could we make, just by stomping, slapping, snapping, bopping different parts of our bodies? The results were pretty awesome. ;-) And did you know people actually do body percussion professionally? We loved watching a video of the group "Stomp" doing their own incredible rhythms. There are also videos of them making amazing music using nothing but every day objects. For our team challenge this week, we made our own musical instruments out of recycled materials and then tried playing a simple rhythm. Most of us even took turns playing different parts, just like a real musical group, so that one person played the quarter notes, another the eighth notes, etc. In French, we continue to practice the differences between all the many ways to write the sound "é". This is a lot to wrap our hands around, especially for Grade 1s! But we are beginning to catch on. Madame took words from our upcoming Christmas play and had us do a word sort, based on the rules for when to use each "é" sound. We also did a "treasure hunt" within a passage from our play to look for and colour those same sounds. And we finished the week by writing our own journal entries using many of the "é" words and rules we have been learning about! In Science, we are wrapping up our little inquiry into spiders by creating our very own information and identification booklet about spiders local to our area. We have enjoyed learning more details about these creatures and some of us have been digging through spider books during our free time to look for more information. Thursday's nature walk was another opportunity to go on a spider hunt and use our newfound knowledge to try to identify the ones we found! Madame questions the accuracy of some of our findings, but we had fun, anyway. ;-) And Madame is enjoying the fact that now when we find a spider in the classroom, instead of screaming, someone yells, "Quick! Take a picture of it so we can identify it!" We read an interesting book this week called "Puppy in my Head", all about how there's a puppy that lives inside our heads that sometimes gets overly excited or scared, and we need to find ways to help it calm down. We talked about how everyone has an animal in their heads, even grown-ups! Then we drew what we decided were the animals living in each of our own heads and strategized as to how we can calm down our own animals. Extra photos...
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