Bridges and Symbols

This week in Language, we read "Le concours de fourrures" with the "our" sound for our shared reading. We continued to finish up another cycle of reading and writing centres. The class practiced inventing and sharing stories. They continue to enjoy listening to stories, despite regularly visiting the same French sites. This week, they also learned how to look up words in French dictionaries in order to find out if a word is masculine or feminine, and then choose the correct article to put in front of the word. We looked at both paper dictionaries and digital ones on the iPads. 

In Math, we are finishing up the unit on 2-D shapes. The class just has a few more activities to finish up next week before we look at 3-D solids. The activities focused on congruent shapes, tangrams, and classifying shapes into Venn diagrams. 

In Science, the students learned about different types of bridges. I then showed them a variety of images of bridges. They had to identify the type of bridge and explain why they thought it was that type, using the correct terminology that they had learned. (Pont à poutre: les piliers, la poutre; Pont en arc: l'arc, la clé en voûte; Pont à suspension: les pylônes, les câbles, la poutre, les piliers) they finished up by designing their own playground equipment using the shapes that aided in stability and solidity. 

In Social Studies, they finished up looking at the flag of Ontario. We then looked at the different official symbols of Ontario. Today, they began identifying the Great Lakes in a map. 

In Visual Arts, the students finished up drawing their snowflakes and began painting watercolours around each snowflake. They will finish up next week and I will post some photos of the art wall. 

I got a nice surprise the other morning when I came back after English. The class was learning about letter writing format and had written me a nice letter. 

Please check the letter that came home last week and agendas to keep up with all of the Reading Week activities. I'm looking forward to taking the class to see all the photos of the staff as children and to see if they can identify anyone. It should be a great week!