Last week began with a very stimulating and informative workshop with Scientists in the School on Structures. The workshop was delivered in English and afterwards we translated the vocabulary that was introduced into French. The facilitator began by talking about the 3 functions of a structure: to contain, to support and to span.

Then the kids worked at 5 different centres. They looked at different structures and sorted them according to their function:

They sorted objects according to their materials and talked about the properties of different materials:

They worked with different fasteners to see how they hold materials together:

They built the highest tower they could:

And they discussed the strength of different structures and figured out how to brace a square to make it stronger:

Then they had an all-group challenge to try to build a structure from newspaper that would support their teacher! They looked at the relative strength of different shapes, and found that the  cylinder was very strong. So everyone set to making newspaper cylinders which they put together into a stool for me.

 It was an exciting moment when I finally tried sitting on it!

After the workshop, we talked about all the activities in French and began learning the vocabulary that we will be using to talk about structures:

We worked on finishing up our season wheels, and sang our songs with the day names and month names some more:

We also finished off our look at seasonal and daily changes by delving deeper into the reasons for day and night and making sundials. We read a book about day and night, and then worked with tennis balls and flashlights to try to understand how the rotation of the earth makes it seem like the sun travels across the sky. Julie and I did a demonstration using a globe, a puppet and flashlights to illustrate this phenomenon. To make the sundials we needed a sunny day, which finally came last week. Each student was provided with the basic sundial, and throughout the day, on the hour, they marked where the shadow fell. 

Our sight words contained the sounds elle and ette. In writer's workshop we talked about putting together a class book, and came up with some possible themes. After voting on the themes we decided to just put together our best stories.

I also talked about the expectation that students write at least 3 sentences each day. I met with students who lately have been writing less than that, and we came up with some strategies that would help them increase the volume of their writing. Then we shared these strategies with the whole class.

In math, we learned positional language (on, over, under, beside, between...) which we will apply in geometry as well as in our exploration of structures. Julie introduced and practiced the vocabulary with the students using various games and a lovely video (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hm5WywlwDrM&feature=youtu.be). We took down the flowers used to keep count of the days up to 100, and turned that space into the new Math Board.

Julie also reviewed the 2-dimensional shapes with students, and together they looked at the attributes of each in terms of the number of corners and sides.