After free time yesterday, we continued in a Halloween theme with an interesting listening and drawing activity. I told our class the story of Symphonie Fantastique, a program symphony by French composer Hector Berlioz. The music tells the story of a young writer who has fallen in love with an actress, but she does not return his affection. He has a series of dreams and nightmares and at one point in the music, we actually hear him get beheaded! In the final movement, witches and goblins and other monsters dance at his funeral. It's a great Halloween story, and everyone loves hearing his head bounce into the basket! As we listened, students illustrated each movement in a booklet. Please ask them about the story of the symphony and how much of it is true to life!
In Financial Literacy yesterday, we talked about credit cards. How do pay it back, and what happens if you don't pay back the entire balance each month? Ask your student how long it would take to pay back a $2000 television purchase if you just paid the minimum payment each month, and how much it would actually end up costing over that time.
Our groups saw the consequences of the decision they made for their character last week. The characters are now 22 years old and have another life decision to make. Ask your student what choice they made this time and why.
In math this week, we have looked at several different types of graphs, determined what they are useful for, and practiced creating them. We used a great site called "Kids' Zone" for making circle graphs, and as it is linked to Classroom, the kids can try out the other types of graphs anytime. We also looked at pictograms, broken-line graphs and stem-and-leaf tables this week.
In French, we are typing the good copies of our stories and moving ahead with learning how to write a good summary. Our grammar this week involves forming the passé composé without a Bescherelle. While there are always exceptions in French, there are some basic rules that work for most verbs. We went through it slowly together in class, and the instructions are also attached to the homework assignment in Classroom.
In Science, we are getting to the stage where our written component for our project should be done, and we can start planning our hands-on portion. Next week, grade 6s will be going outside to examine living things in our yard. Grade 5s will be doing some building, or an experiment, which may be similar to one of the centres we did the other day.
The grade 5s have started working through 6 activity centres examining different parts of the body. In two centres, we are learning to find our resting heart or breathing rate and then examining how it changes with exercise. In another centre, we are testing our brain to find our average reaction rate. In the 4th centre, we are seeing how our skin is affected by water and drawing a connection between this and swimming in the summer. In the 5th centre, we are looking at the ingredient lists and nutritional value charts on some food boxes and trying to determine which product is healthiest. Finally, in the last centre, we are assembling X-ray images to build the human skeleton and then counting up the bones in each area of the body. Approximately how many bones are there in an adult human body? We've only completed 2 centres each so far, but we will continue next week!
Have a great weekend!