May 15-19, 2017

Our dictée this week focussed on verbs. We added many familiar verbs to our word wall through a fun activity. Students took turns reading out the verb on the card, and then while they added it to the word wall the other students acted out the verb through pantomime. In Writer's Workshop, we looked at ways to use verbs to generate story ideas. I also introduced a new word game that is played in pairs, where players sort a word according to its vowel or digraph sound and can steal each other's words that contain the same sound.

We had our final Roots of Empathy session! We met Baby Tagore's father for the first time, and we presented the parents with a lovely gift: a Wishing Tree with a thumbprint from every student and their wish for Baby Tagore's future. We returned to the importance of learning empathy, we celebrated the amazing growth we witnessed in Baby Tagore this year, and we were sad to say our goodbyes.

We planted pea seeds on Monday. Each student is growing their own little crop of seeds in a paper cup.

By Friday, there were little roots appearing and some green sprouts too. The students made their first entry in their plant journal, drawing and writing their observations.

In between all this, we had our class field trip to Allan Gardens. It was super beautiful there! I asked the kids to look around first and then settle on some plants to draw. I encouraged them to notice and record details like the shapes of the flowers and the leaves, how many petals, etc. Their assignment was to then draw one plant with labels showing the flower, leaf and stem. But the deeper learning on that trip was the awe the children clearly felt at the incredible beauty and diversity of plant life we found there.

In math, we reviewed fractions and then began a unit on measurement. We began by talking about area, in reference to the paper cutouts we made last week that showed whole, half and quarter. I explained that the amount we were talking about in that case was the area of each shape. This is a difficult concept for many kids to construct. We started by looking at 3 shapes close in size. Using pennies to measure them, we tried to determine which was the largest and which was the smallest.

Later I played them a short video that tells the story of the Mitten, a famous Ukrainian folktale about a mitten that expands to house a growing multitude of animal inhabitants (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_qA-QjgxIk). Then I asked them to measure the different areas of the mitten as it grew. But I gave each table different units to measure with: some had pennies, some had plastic squares, some had chain links...We will return to this work next week to think about the best ways to measure something, the best units to choose and why, and also the impact of using smaller vs. larger units in measurement.