Saturday, January 17, 2015

Pirate Inquiry


Our Pirate inquiry took off last week as we looked further into a pirate's life. We asked the children what they wondered about Pirates and recorded their thoughts. Some of them wondered why Pirates wear an eye patch, while others wondered why they bury treasures. Then we asked them what they thought the answers to those questions were and jotted down their responses. Then we displayed them within our classroom to make reference to.
Here are some of their thoughts:
We have also talked a little bit about Maps and compasses. We taught the students what N, E, S, W stood for and an easy way to remember the letters: Never Eat Shredded Wheat!
The children have been so excited to play at the Dramatic Play Centre and dress up in Pirate outfits:
 Stay tuned, to see what other adventures we immerse ourselves in. We will be making these parrots next week:

For an introduction into our Measurement unit, we decided to measure Mrs. Ansari. We brainstormed a list of non-standard materials we could use to measure her. The children came up with ideas such as: books, boots, mittens, pencils, rulers and so on. In order for us to measure Mrs. Ansari without having her lay on the floor each time, we thought it would be a good idea to trace her onto a piece of large paper and then cut her out. The children helped to trace her body and then they worked together to cut her out. We have not filled out our recording sheet yet, but we have made a prediction on how many rulers long we think she might be. We will be continuing this next week.
 
Have a wonderful weekend!
 

Wednesday, January 14, 2015

Ahoy Matey!!

This week we read this book:
After we finished reading it, a little note fell out!
It was from the Captain Pirate in the book telling us that his brother was trying to steal his treasure so he hid it in our school to keep it safe. He said he would leave a clue within the next few days about where we could find this treasure for him. So far, we have not found anything in our classroom, but we are still keeping our eyes open! We have been talking a lot about pirates and about why we think they wear eye patches and why we think they bury treasures...
 
Ms. Buckworth gave us a huge box of pirate clothes, so we decided to try them on before we put them out at our new Ship Centre.



We thought it was time to dump out our sand table and filled it up with fresh water. We plan on using this water table to build ships to sail them in. When we poured in the water, the children were really excited, as you can see from the expressions on their faces!!! We guessed how many buckets of water it would take to fill it and some of us were really close. We ended up using 4 and a half buckets!
We added a little bit of food colouring to see what would happen. We noticed a blue outlined circle in the water that had started to form.
We stirred all of the food colouring around in the water until it became an even blue colour.
Then we made some signs for our new water table before we opened it to remind our friends of the rule we agreed upon.
In Art class today, Ms. Buckworth set up the materials we needed to make our own pirate hats! The children got to decorate them and then laid them in the drying rack to dry. They also made their own telescopes the other day with Ms. Buckworth and noticed that the long paper towel roll they used, was in the shape of a cylinder! 3D shapes are everywhere!!
Today we went on a scavenger hunt!! We were looking for letters of the Alphabet all around our room! After the children were done finding all 26 letters, they asked to do it again, so we may try a different scavenger hunt tomorrow!
 

Some of the children worked in pairs and in small groups to help each other find letters.






We set up a new centre this week, called Sight Word Jenga. We taught the children how to build a tower first using 3 blocks each layer and then take turns to slowly pull out one block at a time, until it falls. Whoever can read the block they pull out, gets to keep the block as a point. As soon as the structure falls down, the game is over and can be started over again.
We have also been practicing our writing:

 Please don't forget Library Day is tomorrow! and also - Friday is a P.A. Day!
Enjoy the rest of your week :)