TWAS January 11

Hello Everyone,

I hope your first week back in the school routine has gone smoothly for you.  I fully get the adjustment!!  The children have done wonderfully — they haven’t missed a beat J

Field trip forms are printed off and ready to go so I will be sending them home on Monday. Thank you so much to those who have volunteered to join us.  

I am also thinking about doing a community walk to Dr. George to drop off our monster writing next Friday (Jan. 18th).  I know it is extremely short notice, but if anyone is available to join I please let me know and I will go ahead and put together a more formalized plan.  I think it would be fun to meet the artists ahead of time (the grade 8 students will be making sculptures from our writing).

We’re off to some new starts in our New Year. We finished off the magnets unit with magnet games and have begun our liquids unit.  We are learning how to be professional scientists and performed our first experiment today.  We learned about science safety (tasting, touching, smelling); ask your little one to teach you how to safely smell a liquid.  It’s a really fun unit with lots of experiments and observations.  We’ll keep you updated and perhaps your little scientist can help you to perform a few at home along the way.

We have also begun our inquiry into an Inuit community.  We will be focusing on Iqaluit, but have learned a little bit about Salluit as well. The children loved exploring on our large world map and everyone was able to predict, approximately, where Inuit communities might be found in our world. 

In addition to our math drill, we started to learn how to play crib . . . and they’re doing great!!  We are only learning to count/peg the points in our hand.  We have been playing three to a board, so each player gets five cards, one is dealt to the crib hand and then everyone throws one from their hand into the crib hand.  We haven’t learned about runs or flushes yet.  So basically you get two points for each fifteen and two points for each pair.  This is great practice for mental math and automaticity with those basic math facts, especially as we begin to move into place value, addition/subtraction to 100 and then onto addition/subtraction with regrouping.

Our Language Arts focus is now narrative writing.  We completed a pre-assessment from a picture prompt (see below), and have begun to research what ‘good writers do to write good stories.’  Feel free to keep this question going at home during story time, or while watching favourite movies/shows. What makes a character interesting?  What kinds of settings are fun/scary/pretty/creepy?

Please enjoy the art posted below.  We have been working on perspective so have a few types of snowmen drawings, and learned about wax crayon resist in the making of these beautiful fireworks water colours.

I’ll let the children fill you in on everything else that I’ve missed and hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!!

Mrs. McArthur

 

                                                              writing prompt

Birds Eye View/Shading/From the Mind's Eye (Drawing what they wrote)

 
                           Crayon resist fireworks (black water colour painted over wax crayon)