Week 27: April 3–6, 2018


Posted by on April 13, 2018 at 4:21 PM

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This week, we began more serious preparations for our Junior Drama Night production in May. Students began brainstorming the lesson they wanted their play to focus on and their ideas included a focus on flexibility, an emphasis on strength coming from the inside, and a desire to regard women and girls as strong and brave. In CERES class, students continued learning about vertices and edges during a building challenge and managed to construct a fort to fit all 12 classmates inside! We also kicked off our MS Read-a-thon which will take place through the month of April. Students learned about multiple sclerosis from an MS Society of Canada presenter and have been tracking their reading since the presentation. Together, our six students have already read for almost two hours! We are also learning how to read analog clocks in math class. After a week of learning, many students in Grade 1-2 are starting to calculate how many minutes are left until the start of a given activity or how many minutes they have left to finish a task. It is great to see them taking more ownership of reading and understanding the flow of their day!

 

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M and Z reinforce their learning about vertices and edges while building in CERES. M tells me that "the yellow parts are the vertex and the orange parts are the edges".

 

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S works with A to build a stable structure that all twelve girls in the class can fit inside of. After the addition of a large piece of fabric, the fort was ready for testing.

 

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As we start our inquiry about living things and life cycles, the Grade 1-2s are starting to think about different animals and what they already know about their growth. K writes about the type of pet she would choose if she had the option and decides that she would like to have a canary.

 

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M organized her weekly spelling words according to letter combinations and sound groupings prior to her Friday post-test. M takes the responsibility of practicing her words very seriously.

 

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Z volunteers to help demonstrate how multiple sclerosis interrupts or blocks messages between the brain and the nervous system. The Grade 1-2s are joining the other elementary grades in fundraising for the MS Society of Canada during the month of April for our annual MS Read-a-thon.

 

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K is such an enthusiastic reader that, during reading time, she always grabs more than one book to read at a time.

 

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Z is working her way through the book The Balloon Tree by Phoebe Gilman. She is proud of being able to sound out so many unfamiliar words and enjoys reciting the poem that the wizard says in the book.

 

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M is working on forming her numbers correctly as she improves her ability to read analog clocks. In the past few days, M has been demonstrating her learning in class by calculating how many minutes are left before transitions in the school day. 

 

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G marvels at how large the clumps of snowflakes are on Friday.

 

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Z is great at responding to improv prompts. Here she acts out playing a trumpet in drama class on Friday.

 

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M is a whirlwind blur as she acts out an improv prompt during drama class on Friday.

 

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Z, K, and M developed a lovely system at the park of rotating between roles of front-pusher, back-pusher, and swing-rider. The girls were all giggles as they worked together to get the rider as high as possible into the air.