Weekend Update
January 17, 2015
Greetings All,
Another great week in 220 as we plow forward into 2015. This week we’ve been working diligently on our geometry. We’ve made numerous additions to our math glossaries including specific shapes (rhombus, pentagon, heptagon, octagon, etc), angles, sides and parallel lines. We’ve used geoboards and dot paper to create these shapes and see their attributes in action.
In language we’ve been working on our reviews of the film version of Coraline. We started reading the original novel of Coraline before the break but weren’t able to finish. During the first week back a number of indoor recesses (caused by excessive cold) allowed us to watch the stop-motion animation movie of Coraline. We’re now working on a review that summarizes the plot, notes differences in the version and annunciates the students overall feelings on the film. Most students completed their rough copy this week and we’ll be working on the good copies next week in the computer lab.
Also in Language, we’ve moved on to our fourteenth week of spelling words. Students should have brought home their blue folder with the 20 new words (starting with N) as well as some simple practice (a crossword, a word search and a rhyming words sheet). Students are not expected to have this completed by Monday. We’ll have plenty of time Monday and Tuesday to work with these sheets before the weekly spelling test on Wednesday. The spelling test has been bumped to Wednesday this week because I am away on Tuesday.
Our Art program takes a cue from our recent Language activities as we have begun experimenting with stop motion animation. Using the school’s Ipads and items from around the classroom, we’ve created numerous videos exploring the science and art of stop motion. You can see some of these videos on the website.
For some examples, I recommend the series of short films created by PES which can be found on Youtube (the students love Western Spaghetti and Fresh Guacamole) and all the films by Laika (Coraline, ParaNorman and The Boxtrolls)
Finally, just a reminder that this is a short week as Friday is a PA day.
Have a great rest of the weekend!
Looking forward to Monday,
Mr. Pakert
January 10, 2015
Greetings everyone! Website updates continue as we start our new units in January. Check back often for more info.
Students should have taken home their blue folder and homework bag containing this week's M words and a handful of sheets from class. Most students completed labeling and colouring both the world map and the map of North America. Anyone still working on these assignments should try to complete them for Monday as our "zooming in" on our own global address will continue with a look at Canada and Ontario.
There's no math homework this weekend as we've spent a lot of class time learning about and defining shapes and angles. We're developing quite a list of 2D shapes and have been keeping a glossary of them in our new Math notebooks. We searched the internet for some fun, shape related songs and videos and came across this piece which we all enjoyed.
Our Geometry unit continues next week as we look at more complicated shapes (including rhombuses, parallelograms, irregular and regular pentagons, hexagons, and octogans.)