Dear Families,

First, a belated Thanksgiving to you.  Using the wreath art project, the students were able to determine the things they were grateful for in their lives.

As well, the students have been working on their Fall pumpkins.  They enjoyed using oil pastels and working in such a large scale.  They worked hard to blend and shade their pumpkins in order to show shadow (see the green pumpkin stem) and light (see the yellow light-filled centre as it catches the light). A class characteristic is that we find joy, calm, and peace when we do art together.

Added to our pumpkin bulletin boards, are the large scale leaves that have been made in cooperation with our Buddy class, Div. 5.  The students worked together to fill each part of the leaf with something they had in common with each other.  The Fall leaves they created accentuated the pumpkin bulletin board in our lower hallway.

 

Going back to September, the students also completed their Best Selves, highlighting the characteristics they embody when they are being their “best selves”.  For this art project, the students were asked to embrace the perspective of a young child as they drew their self-portrait.  Below, you will find some examples of this project.

 

 

Most Marshmallows.  A wonderful book about our similarities with one another and our dreams for our future.  We used this assignment to jump ahead to the future and express, in art and writing, how we saw ourselves in our young adult future.

 

In Science,  we have been learning about fresh water.  We have made watersheds out of paper which we sprayed with water to see how rainwater naturally gathered:

 

And, we’ve been making predictions about fresh water availability, globally and locally.  We have used 100 blocks to represent all the water in the world and used these blocks to predict how much of the world’s water is salt vs. fresh (97% salt vs. 3% fresh).  We have also used the blocks to represent how much fresh water Canada has relative to the world.   In making these predictions using 100 blocks, the students have been introduced to the concept of percentage.