Happy Diwali! This Hindu and Sikh festival took place on Monday and we were so fortunate to have two students in our class who celebrate it at home! One of them even brought in her special Diwali outfit and made us some decorations for the classroom. We learned about the history of Diwali thanks to our trusty friend, YouTube, and read several children's storybooks about it. Normally we meet with our Big Buddies in the library, but since that space was occupied with new furniture arriving, we had everyone squish into our classroom for some fun times making our own paper diyas (Diwali candles) and clay diyas. We also enjoyed sharing all our fun toys with our buddies and letting them relive their "childhood" by hanging out in the ball pit. Later, we tried floating our clay diyas, as many who celebrate Diwali like to do. We had mixed results with this experiment since our diyas were not made of the right kind of clay, but with some careful reshaping, some of us managed not only to get them to float, but also to hold a candle! We even tried making some rangoli art with pattern blocks. Normally this type of art is done with colourful powder, but this was our "clean" classroom improvisation. In Math, we continue to practice our number sense, learning about the many different ways to make a number, including (but not limited to) addition, subtraction, and multiplication. We were fascinated when we learned that we could subtract incredibly large numbers within seconds to arrive at "10" as an answer. All we had to do was change the number in the "tens" place by 1! We had so much fun checking our answers with calculators. We have also begun reviewing patterns in Math and Madame made us go outside in the RAIN to look for patterns around the school grounds. It's so amazing how patterns are everywhere we go! Our Thursday walk to the forest was cancelled this week on account of wind. Even though many of us were still motivated to go, Madame was worried that it may be too dangerous to be surrounded by trees in case large branches started coming down. So instead, we went to the school's courtyard for the first time this year. We had so much fun exploring, making mud pies (or "ice cream" and "soup"), staking our territory in the play castle, and figuring out how to pitch a tent. (Madame said she wouldn't set up the tent for us... we had to figure it out on our own). It might seem like this is all fun and games, but we are actually learning so many things outdoors, like teamwork, turn-taking, innovation, imagination, and problem-solving. We also discover new and interesting areas of interest. The past couple of times that we've been out, we've found some fascinating spiders and we have so many questions about them! Does this kind of spider always go in the water? Why doesn't it drown? Can all spiders swim? What kinds of spiders do we have living around us? Which ones bite people? ...So many questions that Madame decided we should start a Science inquiry about spiders. Madame also let us get our hands dirty this week and carve a pumpkin! We tried to vote on a cohesive design that we would all love, but in the end, we voted to each just do our own unique design. The result was an interesting mixture of blobs and bloops as we realized that none of the details of our designs remained after we cut them out, but we were proud of our work, nonetheless, and mostly just enjoyed the process of using little carving knives. And for our team challenge on Friday, Madame had us all make pumpkin seed catapults! First she let us have at 'er without any instructions - just a bunch of random materials. But after a few interesting, albeit slightly faulty design attempts, Madame showed us a practical way of using our resources. Pumpkin seeds were flying all over the place by the end! (And this is why the custodian loves Madame). Extra photos...
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