Friday, June 5, 2015

Week of June 8-12

Dear families,

This week we completed our inquiry on 2-and 3-D shapes, ending with a classroom "shape hunt" in which the children searched the classroom for 10 different 2-and 3D shapes and tallied how many they found. Not surprisingly, most of the objects in the class are rectangular prisms and cylinders, and we have very few triangular prisms. I've encouraged the children to keep looking for those shapes at home and in their environments so don't be surprised if them exclaim, "That house is a cube!" At the various centres, the children enjoyed making various shapes upon shapes with elastics and a peg board, learning that shapes are inside other shapes i.e. two traingles make a square or a diamond or a rectangle. We also practised our 3D Shapes poem, a copy of which is in your child's white bag. The children's homework for this week is to design their own shape by joining dots on a "peg board" like the one we used in class. Thank you to Chloe who brought in examples of 3-D objects from home!

Our butterfly pupas/chrysalis are now in the big tent awaiting the day they come out of their chrysalis and are butterflies! A plate of sugar water awaits them in case this happens over the weekend. This week the children completed Page 3 of their Science Journal, writing about and drawing a picture of the pupas. The details were terrific! Thank you to Cole for bringing in a caterpillar from his cottage! We're not sure what it will will metamorphose into but we gave it some extra food and have our fingers crossed!

We also did two more pages of our Very Hungry Caterpillar book, retelling Eric Carle's story and colouring in the pictures the same way he did. I'm impressed with the amount of details the children remember about the story. Terrific! We will finish the book when the butterflies emerge, which will probably be this week.

The children did a WONDERFUL job tracing and then colouring in a butterfly. They used which ever colours they wished, but the important thing was to make sure it was symetrical, i.e. each wing was the same. I was so impressed with the details and all the different colours the children used, as well as their excellent symetry. Next week they'll be writing, "If I were a butterfly, I would..." and I will post that and their butterflies on our classroom bulletin board.

We also watched a video clip about the life cycle of the silk worm, and I brought in a few examples of silk. The silken "thread" that one caterpillar spins is about 1000 metres long! What an amazing creature. When I explained that 1000 metres was about the distance from LKS to Central Arena/Memorial Pool, the kids eyes grew quite big!

Our new words on the Word Wall are UP, FROM and WITH. Please complete the mini work books that went home in your child's white bag to reinforce the spelling of these important sight words.

I also sent home the new June/July words for your child to practise at home (we read them each day at school as well).

Thank you so much to Theo's mom who was the Mystery Reader. Thank you as well to Parent Council for the delicious "comida mexicana" at the staff appreciation luncheon!

Next week we are going to talk about summer safety: around water, in the home, at the cottage, on the roads. We'll also write more in our Science Journals, and make a book for Father's Day. The Seniors will be making a special book about themselves in Kindergarten for graduation.

On Thursday we will start our "10 days left of school ice cream scoop countdown!" Wow, so hard to believe that the end of this year is so quickly approaching. It's been a terrific year!

I hope you are having a nice weekend.

No comments:

Post a Comment