Week of April 20-25

Dear families,

I hope you are enjoying this beautiful Spring weather! Well, we've said, "Bye-bye Birdies" to our Inquiry and I think the children learned a lot about birds' habitats, their diets, their young, and fun facts. We saw a video of an Ostrich running (and even chasing a jeep!), hummingbirds in flight, and watched as the baby bald eagles have grown and are starting to stand up in their nests. We learned about the life cycle of a chicken, all about the size, shape and colour of eggs, and put our "Ducks in a Row" by putting words in the correct order to make a sentence, then writing the sentence down. We wrote about eggs in some egg art that is displayed in the hall. The children found it interesting that eggs come in so many different colours, from white to blue to brownish colours with spots, and all the way to black (Emu). We also did "Home Tweet Home" math by helping a bird go home by adding up numbers, and learned how to read and sort our Bird Facts/Not Bird Facts folder. We also completed the booklet "All About Birds", which has all the fun facts about the birds we learned about. We wrote about our favourite birds, why we like birds, and drew our favourite bird. Blue Jays, Owls, Hummingbirds, Penguins, Flamingos and Ostriches were favourites (Go Jays!). The kids also had fun sorting the birds we learned about in groups of "Angry" birds and "Scaredy" birds. All the children's wonderful work went home in Friday's white bag. I hope you have fun listening to your children tell you all about birds!

As a follow up to last week's rain, we wrote about why we like/don't like rain. This work is on display in the classroom.

This week's Popcorn Words are HE and SHE. Last week's words were BIG and RUN. The homework for this weekend is to do the mini books for those words.

A big Thank You to: Megan's family who collated the Scholastic order forms; Avery's dad and Adam's dad who were Mystery Readers; Izzie and Sophie for bringing in bird toys to talk about, and Martel's mom who helped with Computer Lab.

Next week we'll start two new Inquiries, on Measurement and Backyard Bugs.

I hope you have a terrific week!