Dear families,
I hope you are having a nice weekend!
This week we continued our inquiries on the WEATHER and BIRDS. We've had warm sunny days, rain, snow, freezing rain, and very windy days this month! We've also started to see Robins come out and are hearing more and more birds returning from their southern migration.
Ms. Patel has been doing an amazing job teaching the children about weather! By doing hands on experiments, the children learned why it rains, what vapour is, how clouds form, what wind can do, how it rains, how there are different kinds of clouds depending on the weather, what the temperature on a thermometer means, and how freezing rain and snow form. She put warm water in a glass ("the sun warms the water"), plastic wrap on the glass (the atmosphere), and watch as the water evaporates and forms droplets on the plastic wrap. To show how clouds "burst" and then it starts raining, Ms. Patel filled a glass of water half-way, put shaving cream on top (the cloud), then with a pipette put droplets of blue water into the "cloud" until it "burst" and it started to "rain" (the blue droplets fell down from the cloud). The children also learned about how freezing rain occurs by dropping droplets of water on an icy plate and watching how quickly the water formed into ice. They also demonstrated their understanding of three different kinds of clouds with cotton balls (on display in the hall). Well done!
In the afternoons, the children are learning all about birds! They are learning about different kinds of nests, how many eggs birds lay and why (for example, a bald eagle only lays 2 eggs in its huge next because the eaglets are almost full size before they can fly and hunt on their own and take up a lot of space in the nest, whereas Ostriches are land birds, eat mostly insects and don't fly, so so they lay about 10 eggs in their nest since the baby ostriches just need to walk out of the nest to find food and aren't as dependent on their parents). We demonstrated this with the kids pretending to be baby eagles and baby ostriches.
We also observed a bald eagle nest and a bald eagle parent struggling to carry a huge salmon to the eaglets waiting in the nest. The parent let the babies eat first. There is a live camera each year on a bald eagle nest (bald eagles, unlike most birds, don't rebuild their nest each year): search "Live eagle cam" - there is one in Florida. The children drew what they observed in the bald eagle nest. I am also teaching the children how to draw birds starting with the letter "B." Ask them to show you how!
The children participated in sentence making centres "putting their ducks in a row" by arranging words in order to make a sentence, then drawing an accompanying picture, for example DOG I BIG A HAVE becomes "I have a big dog." We are also learning a poem for the Sharing Assembly called "What the Robin Told."
The JKS traced the upper and lower case letters of the alphabet and the numbers 1-65 on "eggs" and the SKs did this independently. Good job! They also learned about how small a hummingbird egg is compared to an Ostrich egg!
By learning about and comparing different birds' feet and beaks or bills, the children are learning how to identify if a bird lives on water or land, and what it eats.
We also read the well-known story "The Little Red Hen." about the hard-working hen who does all the work to plant wheat, weed the field, water the plants, harvest it, thresh it, grind it to flour, and make it into bread, but her friends don't want to help until it comes time to eating the bread! The children acted out the story (reader's theatre) and are exploring a hand-on centre with wheat, flour, bread, and seeds (which they are "threshing"). Mrs. Mosun brought in her bread maker and taught the children the step-by-step recipe and then everyone got a piece of DELICIOUS home made bread when it was done!
This week's Cosmic Kids Yoga was "Flamingo Yoga" and "Pose Universe."
Just a reminder that the next Scholastic Order is due on May 18. The words of the week were WHO and DOWN. In support of the Humboldt hockey players (we didn't discuss what happened, we just talked about friendship and supporting others who need help), the children coloured and cut out paper hockey sticks and we wrote words with the letter or letter sound Hh. For PINK DAY we also talked about respect and how to be a friend. The homework for this week is to complete the read and write booklet "AM."
Thank you so much to Sarah's mo who was our Mystery Reader this week!
That's the news for this week! I hope you have a terrific weekend.
