Happy Earth Day!

Dear families,

I hope you got my messages on Google Classroom last week. Unfortunately our day trip to Dufferin Grove was cancelled at the last minute as the teacher was ill. It will be rescheduled - I'll let you know when I hear. I also sent home some algebra that the kids were really into so that they could keep working on it, and you could see it. I used letters as variables and then made questions with them. If your students enjoy this, it's really easy to make your own questions. For example,

A=1, B=5, C=10

A + A = ?

C - B = ?

C + A - B = ?

Last week I finished up meeting with everyone to do a math check-up, and we continued with our math game centres. I added a few games that involved writing addition questions in our math journals using either playing cards, regular dice, or 12-sided dice to pick the numbers. Several students filled pages with questions and answers - very impressive, and good practicing!

We have gotten back into Social Studies for our second unit. This time we are focusing on the local community. We will be investigating important places in our community, and also developing some mapping skills. We began by brainstorming some places in our neighbourhood that we visit regularly. Students mentioned school, the grocery store, daycares, parcs, community centres, their homes, their friends' homes, and lots more. 

We have started into our first big project, which is to design our own city. I've provided some buildings to cut and paste, but students get to decide how to arrange their city and connect everything with roads. We have been talking about where things tend to be located, for example, you often find schools near houses, but the zoo is usually outside of town. We have also been noticing the symbols that are on certain buildings, for instance we know that medical buildings often have a cross or an H. We are pretty excited about this city designing project - still lots more work to do on this!

In language, we are beginning a unit on poetry. We will learn to write a few different kinds of poems, beginning with acrostic. Using a list of adjectives, students have already written a poem using their name, and many have begun one using a sibling's name.

You might have heard that we had an X-Movement workshop last Thursday. The instructors from X-Movement are always so engaging. We did some stretching and breathing exercises, danced along doing some very fun movements, and ended with a game of freeze dance. I think the kids were surprised how much fun they had, which is good, because we have two more workshops! These will be the next two Thursdays, and we really need to remember our indoor shoes on these days especially.

We finished off last week with Earth day. Here we are in our green, blue, brown, floral, camouflage and animal outfits! 

The kids were keen to keep as many lights off as we reasonably could (and still work), and we did a lovely Earth drawing on twice recycled paper, to prove (as we have again and again this year) that you can make cool stuff by reusing what would otherwise be thrown away.

Here are the prints from a couple weeks ago. They came home Friday.

Photo retakes are May 3rd. I haven't had any information so I suspect this is all done online now and that you have already received the first set of pictures. If you would like me to make sure your child goes for retakes, just let me know.