Week 24: Riding the Underground Railroad

Books We Read
Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt
Follow the Drinking Gourd
Unspoken

Weekly Centres
February Portfolio
Mr. McCullough did a big lesson on what trying to spell looks like in kindergarten.  It cn luk lik this if it neds to, bcse it helps us lrn to spel.  Most of us tried to write all the words we could for our February Portfolio and we used our Sight Word Wall to help us!

Patchwork Quilts
After reading Sweet Clara and the Freedom Quilt, we created our own patches for a class quilt, using brown construction paper as a background and different coloured scraps of construction paper to make patterns.  It was the same way Clara made her map quilt, except that she was sewing.

Map Unscramble
We unscrambled a bunch of map pieces, putting them all back together in our group, making four maps of the Underground Railroad.

Building the Railroad
Using some of our action figures and blocks, we created hiding places for slaves looking to escape through the Underground Railroad.  We then role played what an escape might look like!

Other Things We Did
We talked about how Canada is a safe place for people of all colours and types and, how a few hundred years ago, people who were treated badly in America were able to escape to Canada so they could feel safer and have a better life.  Mr. McCullough taught us about the Underground Railroad, talked about how it's not right to own somebody who will do anything you want, and about how it's wrong to think you're better than somebody else because of the way they look.

Letter "A" became our letter of the week, and the first letter that had us starting in the top-middle!

We tried to figure out the story of Unspoken, a story with no words, and how it tied into the Underground Railroad.

Our messages this week had missing words that we had to either find on the Sight Word Board, or work on our sound out strategies.

We looked at our prediction of how many days there were in the school year.  Some people had predicted a million days of school, or a thousand, and we talked about whether we'd even get to 200, and what that might look like?