Two weeks of activities to report on! What a pleasure it is to have 2 adults in the classroom. Julie will be with us for one more week - her placement ends at the start of March break.

We finished up our sundials by decorating them with pastels, making sure to leave the lines and numbers visible. To use these at home, just set the position of the sundial by lining up the shadow with one of the hour lines, at that time. If at 9am you set the sundial in a sunny place and line up the shadow to fall on the 9 o'clock line, it can be used as a clock to read the other times of the day.

We also began having conversations about "growth mindset" to support the kids to try their best and persist when faced with very challenging tasks. For a good overview (for adults) of the ideas behind "growth mindset", check out this 10 minute talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pN34FNbOKXc. In class, we talked about positive and negative self-talk after reading the book Courage, Antonin. We characterized this self-talk as friendly and mean voices we hear in our heads (our thoughts) and many of the kids could immediately relate to this idea. Students shared situations in which they have positive and negative messages in their minds, and we made 2 lists together of these messages. Then Julie and I did a skit for the class in which a friendly puppet (made from a tongue depressor) and an unfriendly puppet gave Julie different messages. In the skit, she eventually stopped listening to the negative puppet and kept on trying with the encouragement of the friendly puppet. Then the kids all made 2 puppets for themselves, one friendly and one unfriendly. We worked with the puppets in the circle, giving students the chance to voice positive and negative messages from their 2 puppets. Later, we discussed whether or not one puppet was right, and talked about our power to make a choice about which puppet to listen to. We'll continue to build on these ideas in the coming weeks.

In writer's workshop we are focused on editing skills to prepare our best stories for publication in a class-made book. We have been editing texts together to make spaces between words, add punctuation, fix upper/lower case errors, and fix the spelling of high-frequency words from our word wall (the accumulated words of the week). We now have an editing checklist to support students to check these things after writing a story. We also looked at examples of stories written through dialogue. I have been assessing the handwriting of each student (while I have Julie!) to determine which letters they need to re-learn in order to form them correctly. The weekly words were with the sounds "-ien" and "-tion".

I introduced a new comprehension strategy puppet, le Comte qui Raconte. This character listens carefully through the entire story, and then retells the events. He retold the story La Determination de Viola Desmond, a book about civil rights history in Canada. We had a good discussion afterwards about injustice and racism, and the courage it takes to stand up for what is right. In Daily 5 we began having reading groups, with kids taking turns reading through a book and then discussing the book.

We are continuing to explore geometry. Julie reviewed the attributes of 2-dimensional shapes and then had the kids do a "shape hunt". In pairs, they used an iPad to photograph all the things they found with those shapes. Then 2 pairs got together to show the shapes they had found. Similarly, with 3-dimensional shapes (cube, cone, cylinder, rectangular prism, sphere, pyramid) the kids learned about their attributes and did a shape hunt to get more familiar with the shapes and their names. Then they played a game in small groups where a student selected a 3D shape and hid it behind their back, and the others asked questions (How many edges? How many vertices? Does it roll?) to figure out which shape they had.

We also introduced a couple of spatial activities that will be part of the new roster of centres when we do our weekly math centres. One is a partner activity with geoboards where the kids take turns adding a shape with an elastic, and the partner must copy that shape onto their own boards.

The other activity develops a better understanding of symmetry. Again in partners, the kids take turns adding a pattern block to one side of a pattern, and their partner must add the corresponding piece on the other side to keep the design symmetrical. The kids really enjoyed both of these activities.

In our Structures unit, we worked on learning the new vocabulary and concepts in order to have a base (tee hee) to build on next week. In a circle, we passed around a bag filled with various objects and the kids each took out one object and said what material it was made of (wood, plastic, metal, plastic...). We did the same game again talking about the properties of materials, which we learned as pairs of opposites (smooth/rough, strong/weak, soft/hard, light/heavy, elastic/stiff, porous/non-porous). The kids added a new dimension to the game, by placing the objects in the centre of the circle in interesting configurations.

Then they had a practice round of free building time, to get ideas for their structure and become familiar with our building materials. Afterwards, the kids made a plan on paper of their structure, with a drawing and some writing about its function, the materials chosen, and their properties. 

Next week the kids will build their structures using glue and tape to attach the elements together.