This week we've been looking at what a traditional story cycle and what makes up a story. We used the story The Pencil by Allan Ahlberg. It is the story of a lonely pencil who decides to start drawing and creates its own world, filled with a boy, a dog, a cat, a paintbrush and much more. Trouble comes when the pencil creates an eraser who starts to take control. But clever thinking and quick drawing bring the story back full circle.
We used this story to examine the important aspects of the story structure. We looked at the characters in story and in small groups, came up with a list of who we thought were essential to the story (as it had over 20 different characters!)
Using the story as a jumping off point to create our own short stories, student's created a list of 10 inanimate objects as character, coming up with names for them to use in story writing. We came up with the idea that the characters are important, there should be a problem, and a solution to the problem and these should be in our stories. Students then got to work in creating a plan, creating a marking guide and began writing. We'll continue with our stories next week.
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| An except from the story The Pencil |
Math
This week in math we've continued to examine our counting skills, specifically being able to count between two given numbers. (counting on from 37 to 49, or 126 to 143, etc). Our grade 2 student's have also been looking at what ordinal numbers are, where we use them and practice labeling ordinal numbers to objects and people.
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| Lining Up to explore ordinal numbers (who is first? who is fifth? etc) |
Science
We've continue to look at creating colours. We had a parent volunteer come and help us with creating gelatin discs and mixing primary colours to create secondary colours to decorate these discs. Check out some of their work.
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| Mixing primary colours. |
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| Creating secondary colours in gelatine disks. |
InLine Skating
We've had a great week of InLine skating with our instructor Sean. Student's really enjoyed it and you could see the growth and confidence in their InLine skills by our third session!
Roots of Empathy
We had a visit with Mrs. Watson this week where we discussed how we use visual and body language cues to discuss feelings, and what body language of babies and children can tell us. We linked our learning to a wonderful story called How Are You Peeling.
