The First Week of November

Hello,

I hope that you have all had an amazing week! We did here, in portable 4.

We finished the last of our Golden Eagle presentations. We enjoyed learning about A.T.'s passion for basketball.  T.J. shared her "Twister" game which helps her to keep healthy and fit.  G.K. shared her "Shoppie" doll.  She likes to play with it when her friends are busy.  L.N. presented the car he and his father made together when he was studying simple machines in grade two.  As always it was amazing to getting to know a little more about what makes each of us unique.

In writing, we focused on writing a recount about our choice of Diwali, the Hallowe'en parade at school or Hallowe'en evening.  We used the "Recount Song" to remind us of the components of a recount and attempted to apply some of our knowledge of paragraphing which we have built through our shared writing of the Golden Eagle presentations.

Math and science this week were all based around our pumpkin inquiries. We measured the circumference of our different pumpkins, weighed them (converting the weight from pounds to kilograms!) and counted the number of creases on each one.  We then used that information to make predictions about which pumpkin would have the most seeds.  Next we cut open the pumpkins and collected all of the seeds.  We took the time to record what we saw, smelled, felt and heard when the pumpkins were whole and as we emptied them of their seeds. We then looked at the seeds from each pumpkin and estimated how many seeds there were.  Finally we tried a variety of strategies to count and record the actual number of seeds.  Boy were some of our estimates off!  Those pumpkins had a lot of seeds!

This week we will be reflecting on whether the circumference, weight or number of creases were predictive of the number of seeds in a given pumpkin or not.  We also hope to be able to utilize our remaining, intact pumpkin as the basis of some line art.

Eldorado's "Me to We" club began its food drive this past Friday.  We have started to collect non-perishable foods for local food banks.  This has inspired our class to start discussing healthy verses non-healthy foods.  We will be continuing these discussions over the next couple of weeks and would appreciate any food flyers that you may have laying around that we could use as part of our health and math studies.


We visited the "Innovation Studio" for the second of our four weeks of exploration.  This week we focused on creating stop motion animation using the "Lego Movie" app and just one piece of Lego.  We also entered our first piece of work into our on-line portfolios using the Seesaw app as our platform.  We hope that you all had a chance to check out our work.

Finally, we would like to extend a warm welcome to A.K. our newest member of 3D.  We hope that you will enjoy being a part of our learning community!

Have a great week,
Ms. Sparling