Recently, all the children of Parkcrest School were invited to answer the question, “What makes a good pet?”  Depending on their experience, some drew pictures and answered orally or used words, most responded in writing.  The purpose of this exercise was to analyse how the teachers could help the children to move forward in their writing.  We noticed that the students needed to add more description and details to justify their thinking.  To see what your child can do independently, please see his/her blogfolio.

Division 8 is beginning an inquiry-based science project on bats.  We are starting with the question, “Would a bat make a good pet?” Instead of giving them the information about bats, the students are responsible for asking questions, giving their ideas and opinions, and investigating and researching the facts.  When the children settle on an answer to the question, “Would a bat make a good pet?”, they will have a richer explanation for their choice.  Stay tuned to see how we are doing.

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Come and see the bulletin board in the hallway.  It’s a hoot! 

Describing the properties of objects is an important learning objective in science.  The little scientists of Division 8  are developing this important scientific skill by using their five senses to develop a detailed description of our class pumpkin.

We described what our pumpkin looked like: orange, round, small, short, rind, stem, ribs.  We shook the pumpkin and heard it rattle.  We took off the lid and looked inside: pulp, seeds, stringy goo.  We smelled the pumpkin:  phew!  We touched the pulp and counted the seeds.   Finally, we cooked the seeds and tasted them: delicious! [metaslider id=4118]

We were surprised by the number of seeds that were in our pumpkin.  We found out that there were 601 seeds inside our small pumpkin.  We learned that if a pumpkin is dark orange and has a lot of ribs, it has been growing longer and will have more seeds.  We also learned that the stem of a pumpkin is called a peduncle.

Ask me to describe our pumpkin for you.

You are probably wondering what math looks like in our classroom.  We do have whole-group and small-group lessons, but the majority of our time is spent actively practicing new strategies and developing math fluency through centres, games, puzzles etc.  We also work together because cooperative learning encourages different ways of thinking while representing math concepts. 

Here we are being mathematicians. [metaslider id=4117]