Although this week was a shorter week, it was still a full, productive week of joy and learning.
In Social Emotional Learning (SEL) we are exploring a variety of emotions. This calming exercise allowed us to identify various emotions we were feeling and to communicate those feelings through colouring. I enjoyed observing the different colours that the students chose to identify their feelings. For example, some felt that brown represented goofy where as others thought goofy was better represented by yellow or pink. The beauty of this activity, is that it is self expressive, there is no right or wrong answer. However, a telling response was that many students were feeling tired and or calm on Monday afternoon after returning from Spring Break.
In Science, we continue to explore the wonders of butterflies! This week we took an in-depth look at labelling the body parts of a butterfly. Ask your scientist if they remember what the purpose of a proboscis is, hint is that it acts like a straw; can they recall what the three body segments are on the butterfly? Next, we worked on distinguishing the differences between a moth and a butterfly? Have your curious scientist explain to you the differences in how to accurately identify a moth from a butterfly and visa versa.
In our Landforms Unit in Social Studies we continue to examine Landforms, but are now taking an in-depth look and analyzing how the land can be changed by environmental factors. On Thursday and Friday we discussed at length how the Earth experiences both rapid and slow changes. We continue to discuss and explore the various environmental factors that can influence a rapid change on Earth’s land, some examples include a volcano, tsunami, wildfire, earthquake and landslide. Can you think of more examples that causes a quick and rapid change to the land? We have just begun to look at the definitions of Weathering and Erosion and trying to distinguish the differences between these two words. Currently we are describing the process of weathering as making a mess. A mess is created from the weathering process because large rocks are broken down into smaller pieces. Erosion follows Weathering, as Erosion cleans up Weathering’s mess. Erosion will take away the broken down pieces of smaller rocks. Stay tuned as we continue to explore these new terms and definitions.
In P.E. we continue to practice our ability to demonstrate safe, fair play, leadership and good sportsmanship in a variety of individual and group games and activities. On Friday we played a variety of physical distant games that incorporated a variety of fundamental movement skills. These games also relied upon our listening skills and stressed the importance of playing cooperatively. Movement Master was a big hit in Division 7 today and I believe it will make a regular occurrence in our rotation of games. Since Movement Master relied upon so many gross motor movements, the students were easily able to monitor their physical exertion levels.
