Week 13: Growing and Shrinking Snow!

Books We Read
The Great Paper Caper
The Chanukkah Guest
Press Here

Song of the Week
Douglas Mountain

Snows are a falling on Douglas Mountain,
Snows are a falling so deep!
Snows are a falling on Douglas Mountain
Putting all the bears to sleep!
Putting all the bears to sleep....

Trimming the wicks on Douglas Mountain
Shining up the chimney so bright!
Trimming the wicks on Douglas Mountain
So we can bring the night!
So we can bring the night...

Weekly Centres
November Portfolio
We added another page to our portfolio, and boy are our drawings getting more detailed!  Mr. McCullough is asking us to use at least two colours and the results are astounding!

Growing and Shrinking Cubes
Using snap cubes, we created crowing and shrinking cube patterns.  We tried to make them as big as we can, with some of us getting seven levels high!

Growing Buildings
In our building centre, we created pyramid-style buildings with a bunch of different blocks

Melting the Ice
We experimented with ice cubes and blocks of coloured ice, seeing what we could do to make them melt faster.  We figured out that leaving them in the water, holding them in our hands and rubbing them, or swirling them around in the water made them melt faster.

Other Things We Did

We discussed proper snow attire and learned THE ORDER to put on our snow gear!  The most important thing to learn was shoes off, snowpants first, mittens last!

Our clue finding skills were worked on in The Great Paper Caper and The Chanukkah Guest as we tried to figure out who was chopping down trees in the forest and why, and why an old grandmother thought that a bear was her Rabbi!

We learned that heat makes snow and ice melt, that you can't freeze ice cubes in an afternoon and that a container of snow takes longer than a whole afternoon to melt.  We're also experimenting with one of our class pumpkins to see if keeping it in the snow outside will make it last longer before it rots away...

...and it couldn't rot away because it was TAKEN!!!  What a mystery!!!  We're looking at a few different clues about where it went, including one student seeing "a man in a dark shirt and a grey beard" taking it away, and a letter that was left behind by "Officer Peter Pumpkineater", who we don't think is actually an officer!  I wonder if we can follow the clues to find out who took our pumpkin and why???

Our daily survey is in full swing, with questions this week asking us to match numbers to patterns, figure out which pattern was growing, an who was better dressed for winter.

A Latin band came into our school for our first assembly!  We listened to music from all over Latin America and one of our classmates was picked by the band to get up on stage and play the maracas!  We all got to dance along to the music at the end!

"B" and the "AI" combination became a part of our Jolly Jingles!

We read the fantastic "Press Here" with our Reading Buddies who, next week, will be helping us make our own "Press Here" books!