November 8th

Our Social Studies learning this week was centred around families.  We learned that our family is one of the groups that we belong to.  We learned that a family is a group of people that care for and love each other and that they don't necessarily need to live in the same home.  We read Todd Parr's The Family Book (We love Todd Parr!), which showed us how all families are unique but that they also share similar characteristics.  We also read about family trees - which is a difficult concept for students to grasp about family members outside their immediate family and how they are all connected.  We made little family houses with a drawing of our family inside.  We made a list of what we know about families.

We really dug into our Creating Colour theme this week.  Colour Day was so much fun!  Centres included the following:

Transparent and Opaque Liquids 

We can see through some colours and not through others. Students examined a variety of liquids in jars to determine whether they were transparent or opaque.

Tint and Shade

We learned that when you add white to a colour, it is called a tint.  When you add black to a colour, it is called a shade.  Students experimented with making colours lighter and darker by creating their own paint chips.

Separating Sunlight

We learned that sunlight can be separated into colours by doing a very cool experiment with a flashlight and a CD in the dark.

Extracting Colour from Food

We learned that sometimes colour can be extracted from certain foods and used as dye.  We experimented with a variety of fruits and vegetables by rubbing the juices onto our papers to see which ones had dye.

Our colour board is filling up with all that we know about colour.  We learned all about the colour wheel and how primary colours make the secondary colours.  

A great story that explains colour mixing really well is:

We made our own colour wheels and practiced our colour mixing.

In Math, we have continued our work with patterns and shapes.  

We made some super cool shape robots!

We also participated in some neat centres which included working with pattern blocks and geo boards.

We also learned how to label a pattern.  We are REALLY good at patterning!

Our Gruffalo book study continues.  This week our focus was on the parts of the story: title, setting, characters, problem and solution.  We also started to look at some detailed description of the story, which will help us in the weeks to come when we begin our descriptive writing.

Remembrance Day discussions in 1C focused around peace.  We read two wonderful books about peace (Todd Parr again!), which helped focus our discussion about what peace looks like. We created a predictable chart with all the students's contributions about peace. Then the students wrote about what they thought peace was to them, using the sentence starter "Peace is...."  They had some great ideas.