Dance-a-thon!

 Dear families,

I hope you had a lovely long weekend, despite the storm. Many thank to the kids for the birthday wishes. They gave my just what I asked for - straight lines and clean desks! I gifted them their recipe book (at long last). They each wrote a recipe way back in January when we were working on procedural writing. They have been asking me regularly ever since when I will have the book ready, so it was fun to finally give it to them. I hope they enjoy trying out some of the very creative snack ideas! On Friday we also had our dance-a-thon, which was amazing, as expected. In addition to these pictures, I posted a couple videos on Google Classroom.

May has turned out to be a very fun and busy month for us. We've had two trips already, and two more this week and next. In addition, last week we had an African dance workshop, arranged by the Arts Committee. Our dancers participated well and were tired out by the end! I posted a short video clip on Google Classroom. Our final walking trip in May will be on the afternoon of Tuesday May 31. We have been invited to view a play at Dovercourt House, not far from Dewson. We will leave at 1:30 and be back for dismissal. I will send home a note this week. We will need a parent to come with us, and you should know that I'm not sure if there will be chairs for the adults, but it's only a 20 minute performance. Thanks to all of you for taking the time to help us with all our activities recently, and for sitting on the committees that organize all these special events!

Last Thursday we went on our community walk down College Street. While we walked, we had a list of places to find, like a community treasure hunt. Each student also had their photo taken with the special place they are doing their project on. Back in class, we have started using our photos to draw our buildings and build a large classroom map of our community!

We also completed some fun mapping work by designing and adding symbols to a map of our school to show where to find washrooms, classrooms, the gym, the office etc.

In language, we are still working on our poetry unit. Last week, I pulled out my little box of trinkets and encouraged students to choose an item them inspired them to write a poem. I taught them about making comparisons in poetry, and we read some examples in a poetry book, where sky-scrapers were compared to trees in a forest, or the Eiffel Tower to a large skirt. The writers did a great job trying this in their own writing, and also tried using alliteration in a poem on another day. Several students have enjoyed reading their poems aloud at the end of a work period. We will all get a chance to do this soon, once we've selected our favourite poem and prepared a good copy.

In math, we had some more fun playing our "Champs des Crocs" game, giving directions as we moved between squares taped out on the floor, and we did some coding brain-teasers. We have now begun a short unit on probability and have already learned 5 important terms to define the likelihood of something happening. Please ask your student to give you examples of things that would be certain, probable, possible, improbable and impossible. I am looking forward to playing lots of probability games with our helpers this Friday!

Last week we spent our art period making marbled paper. It's such a cool craft, using just shaving cream and paint swirled together to create the effect of marble on paper. Try it at home! This week, we used our marbled paper to cut out butterflies, flowers and lots more for spring collages.

These are our Canadian scenes from a couple weeks ago, laid out approximately where they are located in Canada!

In other exciting news, snack program is one more thing that has now resumed. The kids are now provided with a snack each day, usually consisting of fruit and another healthy snack, for example an orange and a muffin. It's great to see all these normal things coming back!

Take care and see you soon,

Tamara