Division 9 read the book Chrysanthemum by Kevin Henkes.  We used this book to illustrate how unkind words can “wrinkle” your heart.

The main character, Chrysanthemum loves her long, beautiful name – until she starts kindergarten and the other children tease her about it.  Chrysanthemum starts feeling badly about herself and doesn’t want to go to school anymore.

As we read the book aloud, each time someone was unkind to Chrysanthemum, we crinkled up a paper enlargement of her skipping off to her first day of school.

At the end of the story, we tried to smooth out the paper, but we couldn’t fix it completely.  The paper served as a visual and tactile reminder that our words are powerful and can hurt others if we’re not careful.

Then we talked about the link between words, actions and feelings.

Math connection:  Chrysanthemum has 13 letters in her name.  We made a graph of the number of letters in each of our names.  We know that most people have 5 letters in their name and one person has 7.

Division 9 has been talking about apples.  We know that apples come in many colours and varieties.  There are green ones.  There are yellow ones.  And there are lots and lots of red ones!  We decided to conduct an experiment to find out which apple is our favourite – Granny Smith, Red Delicious or Yellow Delicious.  Here we are doing our research.

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Here are the results of our research:

Ask me which apple I liked the best.

We read a book about a school trip to an apple orchard called “The Apple Orchard Riddle”.  On the trip the students learn a lot about apples and apple orchards—including how apples are harvested, how cider is made, and what the different varieties of apples are—while trying to solve a riddle.

The riddle is:  Show me a little red house with no windows and no door, but with a star inside.

Did you guess? The answer is:  An Apple.

If you cut an apple in half, right across the middle, you can see the star of seeds inside.  The star has five parts, one for each  petal of the apple blossom.

Ask me about the parts of an apple – skin, flesh and core.