Happy Lunar New Year!
It seems there is no end to celebrations when we share the varied cultures and traditions of Canada’s people. The students were very excited to make Chinese lanterns and take part in some new year celebrations this week. We have an increasing number of students in our school community whose families celebrate this colourful and joyous holiday. We learned why this holiday is called Lunar New Year and made connections to the winter solstice festivities we learned about in December.
We celebrated new year in January by making New Year’s hats/tipis. We learned about how the Blackfoot people decorated their tipis to represent their spirit, dreams/visions and connections to the land. In response, we created our tipis/hats to represent our connections to the land, our learning/growth from the previous year and our hopes/dreams/goals for the year to come. We reflected on the past year and looked forward to the year to come. Personally, I learned so much about each of the students from this project. We have talented athletes, musicians, engineers, gamers, academics and artists in our room!
We have begun geometry and are learning about the names and properties of 2D shapes and how they are connected to 3D shapes. We went on a shape hunt, using tallies to record our results. Which shape occurred most? Which shape was least prevalent? We shall see …
We are learning about the properties of shapes through a fun and interactive exercise called Which One Doesn’t Belong. Try this one with your child and see if you can find a way that each shape may not belong with the others. Some of them were easy, but some of them stumped us.
In science, we have been exploring energy and motion. We have studied the movement of animals in winter through migration, foraging and hibernation. Our most recent exploration was building a mini marble run to learn about energy transfer. What an exciting time we had trying out different marbles on the run and different combinations. We learned that gravitational energy can be transferred to and through objects as well as to other forms of energy, such as sound energy. We will continue to experiment with different types of energy and learn about how and where energy affects our daily lives and how it can be experienced through our senses.
