Upcoming Dates / Reminders:
- Last week I posted that we will be having a Mother's Day celebration in the classroom on May 6th. A couple of days after the post I received an email that we have been approved for a field trip to Goldstream on that same day. We will have to change our Mother's Day celebration but would still love parents to join us on our field trip. We will be travelling by bus to Goldstream with Mrs. Takhar's class, leaving Lochside at 8:45am and returning for lunch at 12pm. We will have time for a quick presentation for our moms in the morning then it's off to Goldstream.
- Read Around the Room this Friday, 8:40-9:00am in our class. All are welcome.
- Fun Lunch is on Friday.
- The Book Fair is back at Lochside, starting on Friday and will finish on Tuesday.
- We have the start to our 'Scientist of the Day' job for our Special Helpers. We have watched a lot of great experiments and the students have done a superb job of standing in front of their peers and sharing their knowledge. If you are looking for more science experiment ideas, check out these links:
- http://www.sciencekids.co.nz/experiments.html
- http://www.schoolofdragons.com/how-to-train-your-dragon/science-experiments
- https://sciencebob.com/category/experiments/
- http://www.kidspot.com.au/things-to-do/collection/science-experiments
Classroom News:
Virtue: Our virtue this week is Perseverance. We will use stories to talk about persevering by trying, learning from your experiences, and working hard.
Literacy: This week we will be looking at the letters J and B. We will practice printing them and forming them correctly. We also talked about the sounds they make and noticed what our mouth does to get ready for this letter, i.e. tongue goes to the top of the mouth, or teeth are on the bottom lip, etc. A stop motion studio has opened up in our classroom. We are using our class iPad and the Lego Movie Maker app and some toys in the classroom to tell a story through video. As we create stories, we will use them as a discussion to talk about story parts; i.e. characters, setting, problem/conflict, ending, etc. We have introduced these elements while listening to stories and it will be neat to see the children come up with their own stories using these elements.
Math: This week we will be decomposing the number 4. We will use concrete materials and draw different ways to show and make 4.
Science: We have started to learn about Spring and plants. The children know a lot about plants and flowers. Here's some of their wonderings that have come up: Do leaves get water? How often do we need to water flowers? Is there more rain higher up? Where does rain come from? the ocean? and, How does the sun keep up strong? We will be using books, videos, experiments and each other(!) to help us answer our questions. The children knew a lot about the parts of a plant so we created an art and literacy project to share our learning. We used our hands to create a plant, then labelled the parts we mention in a song we learned: 'Flowers, stem, leaves, and roots...' We are looking closely at some fresh flowers from our courtyard and noticed the pollen was white. We thought pollen was yellow. We are looking for pictures and information in our class books to help us answer our question.
Gym: We continue to play with the parachute this week. We are learning to work together to make it fill up with air, walk in a circle holding on to the parachute, and playing various games while following directions. There are a lot of smiles on faces when we play!