Our Community Market

For the last two weeks, students in 214 have been hard at work planning, designing, engineering (and sometimes redesigning) storefronts for our upcoming Community Market. In pairs, students will open a shop, sell products, give the right change, and go shopping!

Students were faced with the challenge to create an inviting storefront that encouraged them to think about branding and advertising, all while learning about how to use coin amounts up to $2.

Over the course of this integrated unit, students have become familiar with basic media literacy concepts, as well as regularly exploring the names and values of pennies, nickels, dimes, quarters, loonies, and toonies. We have spent time adding, subtracting, and comparing these values as well as combining coins to make larger amounts.

Please encourage your child to continue practicing with coin values at home. Here are some ways you can encourage your child to use coins and have fun with it:

• Ask your child to help you make the right change when shopping
• Perform pretend 'transactions' at home for things in the cupboard
• Add up the cost of certain groceries on the receipt (like all the fruit or all the veggies)
• Think of all the combinations of coins that could be used to make your age (eg. if you are 42 years old, how many different combinations of coins could be used to make 42 cents?)

Our Community Market will be taking place this Wednesday afternoon and students from other classrooms will be visiting to go shopping!

Science and Technology Update for Grade 2

From the pen of Mdme. Brusse:

 

In Science and Technology, Grade 2's are currently concluding the strand: UNDERSTANDING MATTER AND ENERGY: Properties of Liquids and Solids.

We have covered in great detail the topic of personal safety and the safety of others through studying safety labels and behaviours which ensure safety while working on experiments. Furthermore, we have examined states of matter: solids, liquids and gases, and performed a number of experiments to investigate the concepts of mixing, dissolving, absorbing, melting, separating and other interactions liquids and solids.

Our final part will be to examine floating and sinking through an in-class project.

 

Our assessment was through oral questioning, multiple choice testing and designing. Students work will be sent home for review at the end of the unit.

 

Grade 1 Science Unit - Animals!

A message to parents and guardians of grade 1 students:

Animal Groups: Birds, Reptiles, Amphibians, Mammals, Fish, Insects

Grade 1's have just begun a unit on animals for which they will be asked to complete an individual project and presentation that will require some work and research outside of the classroom. For this project, students will be asked to research two animals, each from different animal groups, and find out as much as they can about their chosen animals' needs. They will then combine these animals to create their own unique 'Scranimal' that will be presented to the class in the last week of October.

            For this unit, I would love if students could bring in any resources they have about animals (books, artefacts, magazines, pictures etc…) to be put on our Animal Resource Table. This will be a place that students can go to for ideas and inspiration. I also want students to try using at least two resources for their project and to not limit those resources to books. They may observe animals in the neighbourhood, use the internet, watch a film or visit a pet store. Library books from your local library may also be very helpful. I will also provide some from our own school library.

The culminating task will also include an art piece of their Scranimal inspired by the prolific author and artist, Eric Carle. I think this will be a very engaging project but it will be better if students are also talking about animals and different animal life cycles at home. Please encourage your child to discuss what they are learning about animals so that the learning is cemented.