Today students should be coming home tired from walking and the fresh air. Although it was a bit colder outside, I must say all students were prepared to be outside for the extended time. We arrived at the bird sanctuary early so students had an opportunity to burn off some energy prior to beginning the program. Our first program was a guided tour of the bird sanctuary. Students explored the trees and ground, looking for seeds and evidence of animals living around. Our guide stopped us at many points to explain how seeds travel, examples of different types of seeds that can be found in the sanctuary and pointed out birds that were flying by. As we continued on, we discovered a beaver lodge, trees that had been cut down by the beaver and the beaver dam. Students were interested in learning that the beaver prepares for the winter by gathering all its food and leaving it at the opening of his home under the water. The beaver will leave is warm place to go into the cold water to bring the wood back into its home. All of this is happening under the thick layer of ice. Our next program was inside. Students continued to explore how seeds travel and looked closely at many seeds. Students learned that seeds can travel by floating, flying, hitchhiking and through eating (bird poop). Looking at these seeds, can you identify how each seed travels? Students ended their field study with a small scavenger hunt.
This is a reminder that students will be participating in a field study tomorrow. As part of the experience is outside, students are expected to be prepared with warm clothes. Students also need to bring a lunch for tomorrow and a water bottle.
As we continue to work on solidifying our strategies in solving addition and subtraction questions, students are beginning to transfer their skills to problem solving. When we introduce new problems, we always give students 3 choices of problems. This allows students to pick the level of difficulty they want to pursue. Some students are encouraged to challenge themselves and others are encouraged to try easier problems first before they conquer the harder ones.
Today students created their own problems. Below are a couple of random problems pulled from students work. There were 139 pucks on the ice. 43 of them got shot over the boards. How many pucks are left? In Mrs. Langlois class there are 500 popsicle sticks and 4000 toothpicks. The students used 58 popsicle sticks and 3 587 toothpicks to build their bridges. How many popsicle sticks and tooth picks were not used? I have $20 to spend. I want to get 2 ice creams, 1 chocolate bar and 2 bags of chips. If ice cream costs $3, chocolate bars cost $2 and chips cost $1, do I have enough money? If I have the right amount of money, how much do I have left over? These are just a few of the student. As students fix them up and use reasonable numbers, we will be sharing them and using them as part of our problem solving questions. As we dive deeper into our bridge inquiry, students are bombarded with new vocabulary and new terms. Sometimes learning a new word and its meaning takes time as well as repetitive use. We are finding that students need this repetition in order to create a solid understanding of new information.
Today in class we brought forward 10 new words (some may have already been known). Students were asked to label a picture of a bridge using the new words. This presented to be more difficult than planned. We will be working on these more through the next couple of weeks. You can support us by having conversations about these bridges as you drive past them. For example as you are driving under a bridge, ask where is the pillar? Where is the pier? Which part is the deck? Having students point and discuss each part will help solidify their understandings. The words we are focused on are: - Deck - SPan - Pillar - Pier - Keystone - Abutmnet/Buttress - Beam - Cabel - Anchorage Today in math, students were given a mini-assessment to demonstrate their understanding of adding and subtracting with and without regrouping. They were asked to show two strategies to solve each question. The following questions are the ones students solved: Following the computation part of the assessment I asked to students to solve a two-step problem. A two step problem is where one must complete some calculations first, and then use that answer to solve the second part of the question. The problem I gave was not only difficult because it had two steps to it, but it also contained decimals. Looking back I feel I may have challenged the students too much because as soon as they saw the decimals, many immediately said they could not do the math. The following word problems were the problems I had students attempt. They could choose either problem. This is something I think we will be working towards in the next couple of weeks. First that decimals are very similar to whole numbers when adding and second, practicing two step problems are not scary.
How you can support at home is to have your child with you when you are purchasing items with cash. This will be a life skill they need in the near future as they build the up to the responsibility of buying snacks at the corner store, or shopping with their birthday money. When purchasing something, have your child round each item to the nearest dollar, add the numbers together. Once they get the hang of that, introduce the "second" step of finding out how much change will be given after you have paid for the item. Start out with simple numbers and build to more complex numbers. Reminders No school tomorrow as it is a Professional Development Day Please continue to send in diapers for the diaper drive and non perishable food items for the Mayors Food Drive. Our last field trip letter for the 2017 year was sent home yesterday. We will be going to the inglewood Bird Sanctuary on Dec. 19th. If you are available to volunteer please let Ms. Samson in the office know and she will check for clearances. So much has been happening in our room that I can't seem to catch up with the blog posts to share it all. So lets start with Friday . . . Two weeks ago, our class received a mystery box that contained a mystery material. I purposely did not share what was in this box until last week. In the meantime, as the mystery was festering, students brainstormed problems that could happen on a bridge. We git very creative in this brainstorming session, where students came up with problems such as Santa and his reindeer got stuck, a unicorn stampede came through the bridge breaking the railings and trolls lived underneath. Eventually students were able to narrow their ideas down to ideas that could happen tomorrow. For example, dropping something off a bridge, bridge is too long to walk across, fire on the bridge and need to get off. Once a problem was identified students created plans to solve their problem and then they had to create a prototype of the problem using the mystery material - CARDBOARD! On Friday students presented their projects and received feedback from students around the school. Sorry the pictures are portrait and I don't know how to change them so you can actually see the bridges! PHOTOGRAPHER We also had the opportunity to work with the photographer MR. W. During his time in our class we learned different ways pictures can tell a story. For example through light and shadow, the size, close and far, texture, and colour. The last bit of class we used our Science tools to create something that told a story. Can you hypothesize what the each story may be about? |