December 19-23, 2016

Concert preparations took up the beginning of our week, culminating in a fun and lively performance with Mme Dungo on Tuesday night. We finished the large and small maps in time to display them for the parents on that night.

Our dictée words last week contained hard and soft "c," and this week they contained hard and soft "g." We talked more about the rule for these changeling consonants, using the analogy of clouds for soft letters and bricks for hard letters.

We continued to work with coins, and applied our understanding of expressions of equality with them. The kids had an open-ended task, to put coins on either side of the equals symbol and then write the corresponding math equation using the coin values. This allowed them to work with different amounts and seek their appropriate challenge level.

We looked at these photos of the kids' work together, and discussed them to better understand coin amounts. This picture was especially helpful for understanding the relationship between a cent and a dollar:

We had another fantastic workshop with the visiting artists. The theme this time was to do with our families. Leslie started off by reading a book about families, in all their various forms. We talked a bit about our feelings in relation to our families. The kids warmed up their drawing skills by drawing lines that spoke of their feelings about their families.

Then we looked at the work of Hans Kline, and talked about the feelings we saw in his abstract work in black and white.

Then Jade demonstrated how to apply black acrylic paint onto canvas using a cardboard applicator. 

Then the kids had a go at it, making abstract images that expressed feelings about their families.

After another demonstration, and once the black paint had mostly dried, the kids went back to their abstract images with white acrylic paint. They used the white paint to mask some areas or to surround certain elements and highlight them.

Our morning with Leslie and Jade finished with an opportunity to learn more about their art work. They showed the class some of their pieces and the kids asked lots of questions.