The highlight of our week was our visit to the Sony Exploration Center. Before we entered the fun hands on museum we played and ate lunch in Marine Park. Inside the museum students could discover sound and light with lots of fun hands on activities. Thank you to Hudson's mum, Emily for being our volunteer for this field trip. It is with parent help that we have been able to take the whole grade to fun and educational places outside the school.
In we continued to review subtraction and addition with regrouping. We also looked at ways to add 3 numbers by making groups of ten or using doubles facts. On Friday students reviewed and will have a unit test on Monday 21st.
We finished up our unit on Traditions We Share with a unit test and a writing piece about how families share their culture. Our last unit in Social Studies is Our Past, Our Present which will take us to the end of the term and will be the focus of our next field trip.
We continued our sound investigations this week looking at changing the pitch of sound. Students explored this concept by exploring a one string table guitar and a xylophone. Longer strings on the guitar and longer tubes on the xylophone produce low pitched sounds and shorter strings and tubes produce high pitched sounds. At the Exploration Center students had fun playing with the pitch of their voice. They also saw how sound vibrations could move things. A great sound walk allowed children to walk past sound tubes that produced different sounds both natural and human made at different volumes.
Becoming Experts About a Science topic is the next focus of our non fiction reading. Students worked in reading pairs to collect new vocabulary related to plants. They will continue to build their knowledge on this topic over the coming weeks. I also did Raz Kids flight checks with each student to check in on their reading progress. I will be resetting some levels to match more correctly with students independent reading levels. We talked about rereading books that we have already read as a skill of a good reader and a way to build up vocabulary recognition and usage in both presentations and writing.
Students wrote in their journals about our trip to Sony Exploration Center and the published their writing pieces.
Students were also introduced to persuasive writing. As an example students discussed reasons to support the opinion that we should clean up our oceans and the importance of everyone doing their part to help. Some students took this discussion out into the park and did their bit for the environment by picking up trash in the park. UST is also encouraging everyone to support the 4Ocean cause by purchasing a bracelet to wear at the school concert. The deadline for payment for these bracelets is Monday May 21st.
Larissa