Fall leaves and more

These past few days we read many books about fall and one of them has inspired our students to get creative and use new leaves to create their own story pieces. We found new fresh flatter leaves on a walk in the ravine. We actually discovered quite a neat phenomenon in the ravine. Make sure to ask your children what the trees were like at the beginning of our walk, middle and at the end of the walk.

They will likely tell you that at the beginning of the walk near the ravine we saw leaves all over the path and coloured everywhere, in the middle of our walk the trees were very green and full of leaves and near the end the trees were almost completely bare. We came up with many theories on why this may be happening.

 -Some students said it is windier near the end so the leaves fell faster.

 -Others said the way the shade hits the trees or the sun shines on them makes them different in different areas.

 -Than we had the theory that water may not get to all the trees equally and therefore some change faster than others.

 -We also noticed that the temperature changes in various areas of the forest.

Before our walk the students got VERY excited as they saw letters in the sky made by planes! They found the letter x and z. It's amazing to see what little eyes can find.

Our students have been very interested in graphing when trying to do surveys. They began these on their own and now we have begun to guide them in understanding how surveys work a little more. A great way to include counting and graphs was to see if we have more boys or girls in the class. 

We learned that we have one less girl in the class BUT when we added in our teachers the girls outnumbered the boys by one. Next we plan on graphing with leaves.

The grade four curriculum involves rocks and minerals and our students were very eager to share their rock findings with the grade 4s from Mrs. Bradley's class. We used this as an opportunity for that grade to see new rocks and for our students to learn more about rocks from the older kids.

Our class loves interacting with older students in the school!

We decided to provide our class with modeling clay and straws/sticks and see what they would come up with based on past learnings. Below are some of their ideas.

More to come near the end of the week...it is a busy week!

This weeks blog continued....below you will see pictures of how building inspires learning. These two boys decided to build towers with shapes/learning pieces we used in class. They used the 3D shapes that taught us about shapes like cubes and pyramids and than told us about their tower and talked about what shapes were used. They were able to list all of them! Than, one used the blocks from letter/word learning to build another tower and we learned about the letters used to build it. Very exciting stuff!

One student noticed there was a new shape in our box and asked why we didn't learn about the hexagonal prism!!!! We were so surprised to hear this big words so we spoke of hexagons, pentagons and the prisms for both. The student decided to try to teach our class about those shapes.

We had a visitor come to our school. Thank you to the Rosary friends for visiting us and teaching us how to pray to Mary the mother of Jesus.

We also really love love leaves and surveys and graphs so what could be more fun than graphing the leaves we love and seeing which ones we like the best. 

Followed by a leaf party of course!