What We're Up to This Week

Special volunteers this week:
Thank you to Sue and Donna who came in to help out in the classroom this week!
Thanks and welcome to our new friend from Ottawa U, Amanda, who will be joining us every Monday morning for the next several weeks!
Thank you so much to Liam and his parents for the amazing class set of headphones! Everyone was so excited to pick theirs out on Tuesday!
Thank you to Genevieve who joined us all day on Wednesday and taught us some awesome Math!
Jeremy came in to help with Math on Thursday. Thanks!
Nancy brought Merlin in to visit with us on Thursday afternoon - we love reading with Merlin!

Language 
-on Monday, we exchanged our library books
-Guided Reading groups are continuing to meet. Students are discussing predictions, asking questions, making connections, skimming and scanning and summarizing. After we meet in our groups, students write an individual response. 
-students are working one on one with Shauna to do 3 minute reading assessments.
-we are continuing to work on our #OneLittleWord projects. Students have come up with personal lists of things they are good at and things they are working on. Then, they looked at all those words and selecting one word that summarizes them and will work as a target for them all year. Then, students are writing three steps that will help them reach this one little word target. Finally, we are creating beautiful art works to represent our #OneLittleWord. Come by the classroom to see these in progress!
-Monday was Martin Luther King Jr Day. It is celebrated the Monday closest to his birthday (the same as Grace's birthday, January 15th, by the way!). We learned about non-violent protests, boycotts, Jim Crow laws, segregation and equality

Math
-we are going to finish filming our Norman Math videos. We promise! Seriously, we do! - stay tuned for those!
-if you're practicing IXL at home, make sure grade 3s are working on "O and P" and grade 4s are working their way through "O, K, and L". Don't forget, if you're logging on at home, you need to add "@churchillps" to your username!
-maps and globes communicate information about the world, but in different ways. We looked at how projections work, and why people put Europe in the middle of maps here in the western world. Students practiced working with words like: equator, Northern and Southern Hemispheres, North and South Poles, rotation, tilt and sphere.
-Genevieve gave us a Math Menu today. We all had to do a "Main Course", then pick some "Side Dishes". All of our questions were problem solving about time. We had to use our knowledge about analog clocks and our addition and subtraction skills to solve the problems.
-We are creating little books about what daily life is like in Canada. Each child is writing about nine times of day and what he/she is doing at those times. We are practicing writing the time on an analog and a digital clock and adding illustrations to show what we are up to. Coming up soon, we'll find out what people in other places in the world do in the course of a day.

Social Studies
-we are continuing to explore  "Project Explorer" and are going to be doing a lot with this website this month. 
-we located Singapore on a map and discovered how much smaller it was than Canada, but how densely populated it is. Compared to HUGE Canada filled with only 33 million people, it is tiny and filled with about 5 million. We talked about how different life must be in a densely populated country like Singapore.
-we looked at a really cool website that tracks the world's population live. Students were surprised that, out of about 7 billion people on earth, 1 billion of them live in China.
-we had a Mystery Skype with Mr. Windisch's class in Coeur d'Alene, Idaho. We practiced asking good questions and using our geographic knowledge and skills to answer questions. They found where we were first! We liked hearing about their town, especially that they have a park called "Craters of the Moon Park" where astronauts train! Because of lava formations, the ground looks like it's covered in moon craters. 
-we worked with Aynsley's class on Wednesday to learn about Inuit life. Together we created a slideshow sharing the facts we learned. Every student got an Inuit calendar to keep.

Science
-we learned about fireflies on Wonderopolis, Isaac suggested we listen to the song "Fireflies". After we listened to it, we looked the lyrics and made connections to other things we'd learned - like dance, the globe and how Mary Poppins and the kids cleaned their nursery!
-we were so excited to see where a search about "bioluminescence" led us - glowing pigs and snails with light backpacks!
-Baby Alice came in. She's 9.5 months old and we are so excited to see how much she's changed in the last four months that she's been visiting. She was so cute when she danced to Taylor Swift.
-we watched an episode of the show "North America" and learned about mountain goats and whales.

Phys Ed
-in Gym, we warmed up by practicing our directions and travelling across the space with hops, jumps, skips, running and bear crawls
-we talked about the purpose of physical education: cardiovascular fitness, flexibility, strength, endurance and teamwork
-students wanted to select their own activities in Gym, so we talked about expectations: we have to be safe and aware of our bodies, we have to include others, we have to use the space well, we have to use equipment appropriately. With that in our minds, we started five different activities in the Gym at the same time and everyone was active, safe and having fun
-we played "Tower Tumble" with Aynsley's class on Wednesday
-students got to join Shannon for another Volleyball lesson on Thursday, they had a great time learning and practicing skills.
-We've transmogrified another Go Noodle character. Because it was Shane's birthday, he got to pick our newest Champ - we'll be working with McPufferson now!

Health
-we ran out of soap in the classroom, so we all washed our hands in the bathrooms today. Things got a little chaotic, so we have a new system for how to wait our turn in the school bathroom and wash our hands respectfully.

Art
-Hudson got a beautiful piece of art that his cousins brought back from Singapore. We were very interested in the art, the Chinese characters and the way the artist signed his/her work with a chop. We have some special ink, paintbrushes and a practice mat to learn how to paint like this.
-certain colours and shapes have particular meanings and designers use those colours and shapes to communicate messages. For our #OneLittleWord projects, we talked about what meanings they have and how we can use them to create our own designs to match our words.
-we have new meditation balls in our classroom, and students are enjoying using them as quiet fiddly toys and to help them get calm and focused. One set has yin and yang symbols on them and we were interested to see what the yin-yang means. We learned that it means that there is a balance between different things - a little bit of light in dark and a little bit of dark in light. 

Tree Families
-our theme this month is integrity. Our big idea is: stand up for what you believe in
-we'll be seeing our Tree Families on Wednesday at the school sharing
-remember, parents are welcome to join Tree Families! You can join your child in a multi-age group every Wednesday morning for read alouds, discussions and activities!

Other News
-students wrote a self evaluation of their Learning Skills: Responsibility, Organization, Initiative, Collaboration, Independent Work and Self Regulation. They took time to reflect on their progress and set goals for the coming months.
-our new Muppet has a name - Syd is happy to join their new friends, Norman and Hedwig. Syd is ungendered and prefers the pronoun "they", instead of "he" or "she". Syd looks a bit different and wears glasses. They were bullied in the past. Norman, Hedwig and Syd's new friends, the Gladiator Snails, will help teach Syd to use their WITS and deal with bullies in a positive way.

NOTE: This post will be updated periodically throughout the week, check back often for more updates!