Monday - Wednesday Discoveries and Explorations

Our Wondering Question for today was:  If you could have a grand conversation with anyone from the past, who would you pick and why?   Hmmm.  Ask your parents who would they like to have a conversation with?

Today was an exciting day, we finally got our new coat hooks in the classroom.  It is exciting to have all of coats together in one space.  Another bonus is that we get shelves to put out all of the wonderful global picture books we have been reading.  Here's a photo:  

We also had a surprise fire drill today. Talk to your parents about how it went.  Review how we are working on a calm and  silent travel from the classroom through the hallway to exit the school, paying attention outside while waiting for me to take attendance and silently waiting for the signal to  return inside the school.  Our goal is travel through the hallways in a respectful and mindful manner.  

Look at the creativity that has been happening outside during recess.  Everybody has  their engineering hats on as they use their design thinking skills to build tunnels and slides.  The snow was a great gift for learning and play.  

 We continue to build our vocabulary and background knowledge the new word this week is activist.  An activist is someone who takes action to make a change in the world.  Just like Ghandi said "be the change you want to see int he world."   The morphographs are active and ist.  Act means to take action.  ist = the person who takes the action.  The morphograph ist is in many words:  dentist, biologist, scientist, orthodontist, and artist, etc.

We have also added two other new words:  indigenous and immigrant.  Indigenous means people or plants that are native (belong to, they were there first) a particular land (country).  So, the first nations are indigenous to Canada.  Here is link to the Government of Canada website to help you learn more about First Nations peoples of Canada and their history.  https://www.aadnc-aandc.gc.ca/eng/1307460755710/1307460872523

Immigrant means a person who comes to permanently live in a new country.  

Speaking of vocabulary here are some pictures of our metacognitive vocabulary wall that we keep adding to.  The words come from all of the reading and conversations we have exploring different texts in class.  We worked together today to review this vocabulary by moving the words around and finding connections.  Students had to define the word, place it on the board and then explain their reasoning for the connection(s).  We discovered that if we used string to map out the connections it would represent what is going on in our brains as we map new connections in our neurons.  

Here's another classroom connection from science to music.  We have learned about music and sound, built our own recycled instruments just like in Ada's Violin and now our class is learning how to play the xylophones.  Look at these amazing musicians.  

In Math we have been working on Number of the Day and Equation of the Day.  We've been exploring how addition and division are connected using base ten representation.  Here is a photo of our strategy for using place value decomposition to divide numbers.  Everyday your understanding of number gets deeper.  

Don't forget that tomorrow is Learning Commons Day - Bring your books.  And ... Friday is early dismissal school ends at 11:30.  Also, don't forget to sign into D2L to expand your learning by completing the tasks I have added.