March Newsletter

Dear Parents,

I've rejigged a couple of things about our Student of the Day and Show and Share. The first is that I've doubled up to make sure that every student has an opportunity to present their show and share in March. We've been having some difficulty making sure that everyone is on theme and I think that spread between months was part of the challenge.

When these themes work, they can contribute to an ongoing classroom discussion about an idea or topic--everyone's perspective is so different that we end up creating something new just by coming back to it again and again.

This month's theme is PLACES. Please send in students with a photo or printout of a map and help them talk about a place. We'll do our best to map those places here in the classroom, whether they end up being part of a community map or posted on a world map.

Here's your March Newsletter!

Have great week!

Sincerely,

Ms. Goegan

Learning threads

Dear Parents, 

There were lots of threads to pick up moving through this week.

First, we started with an experiment about the viscosity of various liquids, comparing glycerin to water using droppers. 

 Next, a student followed up on our discussion of leaves last week by bringing in an oak leaf.

Another student brought in a book on Klimt, so much of our creative effort this week was spent researching him and his work, then creating paintings that recreate elements from his, like use of bold colour and background patterns.

Looking at different Klimt pictures on the Ipad

Students at work. You can see the background spirals and bold colour swathes in the two foregrounded works

Trees and people were popular topics

My exemplar is in the background

I hope to show you a couple more of these here, but we'll be putting them up on display in our hallway soon as well, if you happen to be in the school. 

My second idea for what to do with Klimt's inspiration was mosaics. This is proving harder for students to manage and sustain interest in, particularly the abstraction, but we'll keep working on this. 

Of course, the hundredth day is still very much a topic of discussion. Here are students making patterns, measuring the links against the length of the carpet, and counting to 100. 

10 groups of 10

Another recurring math thread in our classroom has been surveys. Students complete them at a variety of levels. Below is an example of an SK carefully writing out his questions and making check boxes, where the JK approach is more improvisational. 

Questions range from "Do you like Star Wars or Princesses?","Do you like Hot Chocolate or Tomatoes?", "Which is your favourite, Kylo Ren or Han Solo?", "Do you like Jellyfish?" and the ever popular, "Do you like Ice Cream?" Hot Chocolate won by 1 and Han Solo by a landslide; the other answers were "Yes". Apparently most people in our classroom like all those things. 

Then, because this is exactly the sort of thing that warms my teacherly heart, here are two students examining our whale tooth and debating at length, which sort of whale it came from. Probably my favourite moment this year was when Nasr actually found a picture of an Orca tooth in google images and carefully wrote it down on a piece of paper to read out loud to the class at the end of the day. 

Finally, you have two photos which show how busy the learning environment really is, with learning centres piled up on each other. 

Counting links, writing journals and doing surveys at the same table

A Ms. Moniz sneaky special showing me working on journals, while art and science go on in the background.

A hundred and other numbers

It's always nice to come back from a break with a couple of new things on the go. Today we read a book about hockey called "The Highest Number in the World" and I started it by asking students what the biggest number they knew was. The first number I got was 190, and the other answers ranged from 21 to 7, 000, 000, 000, 000, to infinity, so there was also a wide range of understandings and many ideas to unpack. 

We talked about how zeroes act as placeholders, how we can tell a number is bigger,  how we could always make a number bigger by adding one and counting from a higher number using the patterns we already know (Seven trillion and one, Seven trillion and two, etc). Some students got really excited, and after that the story was a little underwhelming (though certainly not for everyone--the story's inclusive rewriting of hockey history to include women was a hit with Linnaea in particular)

You can see my recording of some of the original answers as well as subsequent student's ideas

We used the squares on the carpet to make a place value chart and teddy bears as counters

Add caption

I also brought back this mysterious item from New York. The big reveal will be tomorrow morning, but we got a lot of guesses. (Spoiler alert: It's a replica whale's tooth)

Most common guesses were teeth, bones, shells and claws. 

But I really wanted to show you some details from last Thursday's 100th day celebrations. In the morning, we went around our circle with each child explaining what their favourite part of their vest was. (Valentine exchange took place in the afternoon, but was very busy so no pictures were taken.)

5 Ninjagos

100 cats on 10 carpets

 Later we made towers with 100 popsicle sticks.

 We walked through the school with our vests on parade

Brothers

Some of the vests slipped a bit en route

There was a lot of variation and individuality in the execution of each vest. Thank you to all parents for supporting this learning at home. As you can see by today's learning about numbers, students are thinking about numbers in new ways!

Sincerely, 

Ms. Goegan