February 29 - March 3

"Super" Day!

The students enjoyed dressing up as their favourite superheroes and characters on Thursday!

Curriculum Update

Language Arts

During our reading workshop this week one of the books I read was "The Wolf Who Cried Boy" by Bob Hartman.  I chose this book to reinforce the idea of a "motive" in story writing.  Motive is what the character wants/doesn't want or needs.  Story problems are created when the character's motive (need/want) is blocked by an obstacle.  In the "Wolf Who Cried Boy" a young wolf is tired of his food and wants food made from human boys.  Several times he tricks his parents into thinking there is a boy nearby.  After this, his parents don't believe anything he says.  The wolf eventually stops crying "Boy" after his parents stop believing him and he acquires a taste for liking apple pie instead.

During Writer's Workshop we started our Easter stories.  The students spend some time planning their stories, including motive, setting, problem and outcomes.  After planning out their stories, the students focused on using Sensory Imagery to write the setting.  Effective settings establish the tone of a story and engage the reader's curiosity and imagination.  Taking the time to build a verb-based sensory imagery language, modelling and using varied sentence starters helps to the students to achieve writing success.  Next week we will continue with the problem and attempts to solve the problem.

Math

This week we reviewed and consolidated our learning of multiplication. The students continued to work on their metal math facts up to 5x5 as well as they wrote their unit test in multiplication.

Science

This week the students completed survivor challenge #5!

Thanks to your great work, our sleeping area is off the ground and safe from the rain! Now we all can get some much needed rest and go to sleep. Serenity and Jack wake up before the rest of us and surprise us with breakfast. They have picked some ripe berries that they found growing nearby. We soon realize that we don't have a proper table to eat on. Gage, Marissa, Colton and Leigha go in search of materials to build a table.  Luckily they discover some useful things from the plane. Gage brings back a rectangular piece of metal for the table top.  The others bring back different materials that could be used as the centre pillar to support the table top.  Marissa returns with part of the jet engine, which is a cylinder shape. Colton finds a triangular pillar which was part of the plane's rudder. Leigha brings back a rectangular crate that must been part of the plane's cargo.   We can't decide who's pillar we should use for our table.  The table should be strong enough to support our food or anything that we put on it.  We need to decide which shape of pillar use.  Which will hold more mass - a cylinderical, rectangular or and triangular shaped pillar?

Question: Which shape of pillar is the most stable?

Discovery: The cylindrical pillar is the strongest because it does not have any corners and ?the weight is distributed evenly.

Social Studies

This week we continued to learn more about the Tunisian culture by focusing on Celebrations and Traditions.