Colour House Day and a Brain Bike

This week we got to enjoy one of the new brain bikes, right in our class room. We will have the bike for a couple of weeks before it is moved to another classroom. The students take turns rotating through the class list for their turns. They can work, listen to lessons at the carpet, and even eat while on the bikes. While it was a little disruptive at first, everyone has gotten used to the system and I don't even notice when they switch up.

We also had another Colour House Day on Wednesday. I love seeing everyone in their house colours showing their school and house spirit.

This week in language, we read "Le loup qui enquêtait au musée" for our read aloud. This was the last of the loup series that I have so we will be moving on to other books for the rest of the year. The students really enjoyed the series and often sign out the few loup books that are available at the library.

For our shared reading, we read "Horace" and "Une graine voyageait".

Most guided reading groups are working on understanding descriptive text. In guided writing, groups are either finishing up their animal descriptions or are working on a description of an object. They are learning about writing paragraphs: indenting, one idea per paragraph, and when to switch to a new paragraph.

In math, we finished up our unit on measuring mass and capacity, counting money, and temperature. We began our next unit on telling time. The grade twos need to read time to the quarter hour while the grade threes need to read time to the five minutes. This week we focused on reading time on clocks and showing a given time on their own individual clocks. Next week we will have our usual daily 3 math centres for time before we move on the following week to our next unit on multiplication and division. Time is something that students will need as a life skill and is a great one to practise at home.

In science, the grade threes did an experiment on static electricity using a plastic comb and some cut-up pieces of paper. For some, it took a few tries before they were able to have enough charge on the comb to pick up the paper.

The grade twos learned about the difference between transparent, opaque, and translucent. They checked out a variety of objects and listed which of the three the objects were.

In social studies, the grade threes began their new unit on early communities in Ontario. Given a kit about the Métis of Ontario, they had a prompt and had to come up with questions that they had as they looked through the artifacts in the kit.

The grade twos learned about communities in Australia and about some distinguishing features of Australia (landscape, animals, people, language...)

In drama, we reviewed steps to take when the students have a conflict. They worked in partners with puppets to practise using words to communicate about the problem and resolve it.

Coming up in April, the school will be collecting old cell phones as a fund raiser. We will accept the chargers too but they are not required with the cell phones. If you have any old cell phones that you no longer use, working or not, please consider donating them to the school for this fundraiser.

Please check Bloomz and agendas regularly for school/class communication. These last few months are busy with lots going on.

I hope everyone has a great weekend.