With the Christmas concert coming, we have upped our music classes each week from two periods to four periods. This extra time has to come from somewhere...so depending on the day and the timing of the extra music period, some things will be dropped. This makes things tricky timing wise at times and students have to be flexible. We've been working on being flexible thinkers for the past two and half months, so this is a great opportunity to practice this new skill!
LITERACY
After finally finishing the final chapters of The Trouble With Chickens (we were missing so many students each day, I kept putting it off), we turned our attention to reading two of my favourite books for Remembrance Day. First we read, A Bear in War by Stephanie Innes and Harry Endrulat. A Bear in War is based on a true story about the Rogers family from East Farnham, Quebec. Lieutenant Rogers, the father in the story, died in the Battle of Passchendaele as a medic trying to save the life of an injured soldier. The story follows the family in the months leading up to Lawrence Rogers joining the other soldiers fighting in WWI through to his death after four years overseas. The narrator of the story is Teddy. The students often become emotional when we read the story. I think for many of the students, it's the first time that they really grasp the sacrifice that the soldiers.
For the past 20 years, when I finish reading the story, I always have said, "One day I am going to go to Ottawa and see Teddy in real life at the Canadian War Museum." This year I was able to say something different, "I feel so lucky that this summer when I was in Ottawa, I got to see Teddy on display with Lieutenant Rogers' jacket."
We also read the follow up to this story called Bear on the Homefront. This story catches up with the little girl in the story as an adult. She is working as a nurse serving on the homefront, welcoming children from British cities who were sent to live with Canadian families during World War II.
Our library has both books if you are ever interested in reading them.
With our adjustments in our schedule and the performance on the haunted house paragraphs, I decided to stay focused on our ideas theme for writing for a couple more weeks. The students were so passionate about our discussions surround Remembrance Day, I decided to harness this energy and focus them on writing another idea web and paragraph. We did the web as a class and came up with a common topic sentence, Remembrance Day is a very important day. Students then wrote their paragraphs and did a fantastic job!
NUMERACY
With many student absences this week, I was hesitant to fly through new math concepts. We practiced comparing numbers using both base ten blocks and numerals during our math time. Students also learned a valuable lesson this week when many of them rushed through an "easy math activity" and made several careless errors. This reinforced some student work habits that we have been working on:
- always try your best
- pay attention to the instructions
- follow the example if you are unsure of what to do
- learn from your mistakes
SOCIAL STUDIES
This week was so much fun during our Social Studies time! The students amazed themselves with their ability to take notes from the videos after a little practice! It was awesome to see their confidence in their abilities increase so quickly! The students enjoyed all of the videos and loved learning new things about the seven continents. Here are our notes on Africa and Asia:
The students have been so interested in exploring the continents that I decided to take things one step further. After completing our booklets, writing two sentences about each continent using our notes, I asked the students, "If you could pick one continent to visit, which one would it be?" Students responded and I quickly matched them up with a like minded partner. I gave them a website to use and students researched their favourite continent. We came up with three focus headings to guide their research:
- Places I Would Go
- Things To Do (fun and relaxing)
- Animals or Special Landmarks That I'd See
Students enjoyed doing the research with a partner and were so excited to find new and interesting places to visit! They took notes as a team and will use their notes to help them this week with a writing project. This week, students are going to make an idea web based on their research to answer the question, "Why visit ____?" Once their idea webs are finished, they will write a paragraph about why they want to visit their chosen continent.
Here are the links to the videos that we have been watching on each continent in case your child missed one over the past week or so:
Here is the link to the research website that the students used:
Enjoy the rest of your long weekend!
Take care!
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