Almost at the break!

School is a busy place in December.  We are tying up some loose ends in science, beginning a new unit in Social Studies, rehearsing for concerts and choirs, outfitting our environment with some winter cheer and enjoying the SNOW!  No wonder we will all be exhausted by Christmas Break!

Last week we enjoyed our Winter concert. As a class, we sang, performed on the recorders AND did a holiday dance!  Our grade 2's were excellent student leaders as they assisted their peers in the RISE and DD classes with their parts of the performance.  Grade 2 students--you are an excellent example of caring, kind, compassionate and helpful Eldorado leaders!

In math we continued to look at some 2D geometry concepts.  We reviewed the ideas of congruency and parallel lines.  Students used the app Explain Everything to record their understanding of congruent shapes using geoboards as math tools to make shapes that were congruent.  A final assessment task of our understanding of 2D geometry concepts included a quilt block that was made up of various shapes.  Students wrote paragraphs explaining the parallel lines, names and types of shapes within the block, the congruent shapes that went together to make the block etc.

We also began to use 2D shapes to solve various puzzles.  We read the book Grandfather Tang's story which is a story told using tangrams and then recreated the various parts of the story using our own tangram sets.  Students use a lot of spatial skills to orient the 7 pieces in various ways to make pictures or objects.  It is amazing to see how easy this is for some who seem to automatically see how the shapes must fit together to mimic an object and how others really struggle to orient shapes to make a match!

In sorting our 2D shapes we had to take a step back to learn how to sort using various types of Venn Diagrams.  We learned that different types of diagrams can be used to represent different types of sorting rules.  It was a challenge to try to choose the appropriate Venn diagram to represent the various ways we sorted objects.  We now know that the Venn is another math tool to use to help us effectively represent and communicate our sorting rules.

Our read alouds have turned to short stories...some math related such as Grandfather Tang or the Greedy Triangle and some are just for fun!  We have read a number of short stories from the And Then It Happened collection of books and have focused on visualization as a comprehension strategy.  Those stories lend themselves very well to visualization as there are many plays on words and double meanings of language that add humour....if we understand them!  In the new year, we will delve into our next chapter book read aloud to develop comprehension over a longer storyline.

With the approaching winter holidays, many students asked if we could please put up a tree in our portable.  I am glad they feel comfortable and at home and wanted to add holiday and winter cheer to our learning space!  So we put up a tree--with lights, decorations and all.  Students made all of the decorations using patterns on grid paper and following those grids to recreate the pictures or patterns using perler beads (melty beads) and peg boards.  They look awesome and students ended up spending many nutrition breaks making more, and more and more and more!  They loved the math and art connection as well as creating neat things from scratch!

We are almost approaching our final coding mission using the EV3 robots in the Innovation Studio.  We have built them, programmed them to move forward, backward, turn, go through mazes and now we have built and are using 3 types of sensors--sonic sensors, light sensors and touch sensors to complete tasks.  Our final mission next week will require us to work together and use ALL of our new coding and programming skills to get the job done!  We can't wait.  Coding has provided us with many math connections but also helped us to work on our collaboration, problem solving, reasoning and reflecting, accountability, responsibility and critical thinking skills!  We learn so much from our time together in he Innovation Studio.

We will be beginning a new social studies unit.  For our grade three students it will focus on Communities of the Past in Canada (around the 1780-1800's) and our grade two students will focus on traditions and celebration past and present as well as present day communities around the world. To start our unit, we needed to help make the idea of 'past' concrete.  We created a historical number line to help us visualization how far in the past we will be talking about and added the dates of a large number of inventions students wanted to inquire about.  Adding those inventions to our timeline will help to give us context to realize what those communities in the 'past' did not have access to (things like electricity, internet, cars, machines, ipads, refrigerators, stoves, microwaves)....Oh my....how do we think those communities met their needs?   We will see....... In creating those timelines, we used our number pattern sense to create a pattern that counted backwards by 5's starting at 2017 and ending at 1780. Students quickly saw patterns and realized that we were never going to land on the year 1780.  We opted to land on the nearest number we could to that year!  LOL
We then had to rely heavily our concept of numbers and place value as we ordered those big numbers (like 2017. 1997, 1945,1862, 1808, 1737, etc. on the number line). What a lot of thinking and problem solving we do everyday!!!

We look forward to our trip next week to experience how some of those early Canadian communities lived and met their needs.  Please DRESS YOUR CHILD WARMLY!  LAYERS, LAYERD, LAYERS!  The key to staying warm outdoors and enjoying winter activities is to layer your clothing.  Extra socks in the backpack are ALWAYS a great idea.  Following our trip, we will work hard to write recounts of our experiences.  We will work on the first drafts before the winter break and do the editing and publishing of that writing upon our return in January.
Enjoy the winter blast and the excitement of the approaching holiday season....it may mean a time of rest and relaxation for you and your family, it may mean Christmas celebrations with friends and family, it may mean travel to warmer destinations.....the holiday break can mean so many things to so many people. Whatever the break means for you and your family, please enjoy the time together, be safe and return rested and ready to go again in January!

Happy December!

Happy December everyone!  

With December comes a busy month of concert rehearsals and concerts! Students and teachers work very hard to put on special shows and performances for you to enjoy.  Please come out to watch your child perform for you and our community on December 8th.  Our whole class is performing a variety of numbers (dance, recorder, etc.) along with various choirs and bands from the older students.  A few students from our class who are in the Pebbles Choir are also performing on Dec. 15 in the evening at that concert.

With December also comes the promise of a well deserved winter break.  We will be at school this month right until the 23rd of December.  Aside from concerts and rehearsals, we will continue to be busy with MANY learning adventures....as usual for this group of awesome, eager learners!!!!

 If you are going to be away on an extended vacation, please check the blog, your child's seesaw account and our Twitter account for details about what we are doing.  While away, it is a great idea to take along some reading material for your child.  Daily reading is important.  Another great idea, is to have your child keep his/her own version of a blog/journal/trip diary.  A great platform that ALL of our students are familiar with using is Google Slides.  They can create various slides over the course of your trip and include digital images and documentation about his/her trip and the adventures you take together as a family.  Your child can present this to the class upon their return or he/she can just share the document with me to view and discuss with them.  Family trips and family experiences are important!  Reading and writing are important too!  Why not combine them?

Probably the most exciting learning your child has come home to talk about is our EV3 Robot building and programming experiences this past week.  Students followed a procedure to build their own J-Bot and then learned about programming it to do basic moves like move forward, move backward and turn.  This led to lots of fun creating mazes and programming the robots to go through the maze without crashing through walls!  From there, we moved onto learning about the input sensors that our Ev3 robots can have as attachments. On Friday, we started building and attaching the touch sensors.  We will program with that input sensor on Monday.  Over the course of the week, we may get to build, attach and try out the other types as well.  Exciting coding plans this week too!

In math, we continued with 2 dimensional geometry. We learned about angles, parallel lines, congruent shapes etc.  We worked with those ideas and played with those ideas using geoboards, cut out shapes, dot paper, pattern blocks and other math tools. Throughout the week, we sorted and categorized our shapes many ways. We are moving to naming attributes and properties and learning how they differ in the upcoming days and week. At the end of the week, we collaborated with Mrs. DeRivera's class (3E) on a problem solving task involving Venn Diagrams.  Students were shown 3 types of Venn diagrams and we are learning how each type of different and used for different types of sorting rules and purposes.  This was a VERY difficult task for many, many students.  Therefore, we will work with Venn Diagrams this week of all kinds to learn and practice more about how to use them effectively to represent our sorting rules.  After a lot of Venn diagram practice, we will return to the cut out shapes and try again to sort them different ways using each of the 3 Venn diagrams.

In language, we worked a lot on our retelling skills.  In doing so, we got to read many awesome texts...some graphic texts (comics in your mind) and regular fiction texts. We are getting very good at picking out the important information in a fiction text to include in a retell of a story.  Independently, we did one on the book the Great Kapok Tree to use as a comparison to our next independent one by the end of this week. We used shared writing to do some together and group writing to do a few others. Our first group task, was to work in a group of 6 who read a text together.  2 were assigned the beginning, 2 the middle and 2 the end to complete a retell.  The groups were not allowed to communicate with the other groups on other parts of their story.  We used it like a puzzle and put the pieces together to see if the retell made sense to the audience.  The audience listened and then retold what they understood the story to be about before each story being read aloud to them.  After the read aloud, students brainstormed what important information had been left out of the group's retell.  We listened and used that feedback to try again another day with a new group.  This time, a group of 3.  One student each responsible for a piece (beg, mid, end).  The groups will present their retell on Monday and Tuesday to the audience.  We will then move to doing another independent retell later this week to see how we do now that we have criteria and practice in those skills!  Stay tuned!

We will be finishing up our science units this week and then be moving onto a social studies unit that will take us well into the new year with new learning.  We will be going on a field trip the week before winter break to Crawford Lake to connect some of our classroom learning with some real first hand experiences.

Eldorado had some great presentations this week.
1.  Anthony McLean came to do an anti-bullying presentation.

He had some very powerful and important messages and strategies to use in conflict situations we find ourselves in with our peers.  Trust me, conflict is a part of our daily interactions with others and arming our students (your children) with positive strategies to deal with these interactions is VERY IMPORTANT!  An important message he gave students was to use their

WITS 

when dealing with others: 

WALK away, 

IGNORE them,

  TALK it out,

  SEEK HELP! 

 In that order!!!!!!  Many students' first reaction is to run and get a teacher to deal with a situation between friends.  Please have discussions with your child about using their WITS!  It will certainly help them to be more independent problem solvers in dealing with peers.  Thank you.
2.  Grade 2 students attended a presentation by the Toronto Zoo on the Great Lakes and the habitats of the plants and animals that live there.