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.
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!
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