Harris- Room 8

Today  we started our new science unit, Exploring Liquids with the creation of a lava lamp.

I would like to give a warm thank you to Charlie's Dad, Charles and Charlie's Grandpa Jim for joining our class and sharing with us information about the history and significance of the Canadian fur trade. Jim shared with us wonderful stories related to his past experience working for the Hudson's Bay company and how trading shaped our economy. Through the use of incredible artifacts, the students were also able to learn more about specific animal adaptations and the roles they play in a food chain.

Today we played a simple game with two dice to practice our skill of counting on when adding.  What is the count on method? Counting  on is a mental math skill where, when adding two numbers, you begin  counting  from the largest number and add the second number to it.  Counting  on helps us figure out how many more we need of something and how many we will have once more is added.

Celebrating World Kindness Day and discussing how acts of kindness can occur everyday in the classroom.

Today we had a wonderful day walking to Fort Calgary and learning all about the role that the Fort played in Calgary's history as we evolved from being a prairie grassland to a city. Thank you so much to our parents for volunteering and helping us make our trip a success. 

Today we explored the work of Georgia O'Keeffe and discovered her wonderful and unique way of enlarging her paintings of flowers. To commemorate Remembrance day we have been discussing the importance of the poppy and what it symbolizes. It only seemed fitting to use this beautiful flower as our inspiration for our art.

Last we as we prepared for Halloween the students participated in a pumpkin exploration. During this time we learned and reviewed common words such as big, bigger, biggest, wide, wider and widest. The students learned how to record predictions and information gathered using a bar graph.  We also estimated the number of pumpkin seeds we thought were in a particular pumpkin and then proceeded to gut our pumpkin and count the seeds. The students quickly discovered the most efficient way to count our seeds and work cooperatively in a group to get the most accurate count. As an additional challenge, the students were asked to see if they could find an effective way to measure the distance around the pumpkins using only a piece of string, pencil, paper and as many unifix blocks they would require. It was very impressive to see and hear the different strategies each group came up with to fulfill this task.