November 23

In Social Studies we have been working on learning about different communities that we are members of. Students were asked to do a quick review and identify what communities they belong to. Most were able to list that they are part of the Kenneth D. Taylor school community and the neighbourhood of Evanston. However, many of us forgot and struggled to name the other community groups that are larger than our home community. We will continue to work on the vocabulary of city, province, and country and go through examples of how smaller communities are joined together to make larger ones. It's a tricky concept because students are very good at naming places that they know or have heard of but they don't yet understand where they are or the size of them. We will continue to explore these ideas before we narrow our focus on the 3 specific communities in Canada. 

In Science, we discussed different states of matter and tried to figure out how to define solids, liquids, and gases. Students had pretty good background knowledge and could describe some characteristics of each. We used these poems to help us: 

Then we worked in groups to sort pictures of various gases, liquids, and solids into their appropriate categories. Some were really difficult to decide and it was great to hear the discussions that students were having to figure them out. Here are some examples of the lists that they came up with. Once we all had a chance to talk in small groups we joined together as a class and decided what pictures we would include on each poster and why. It was a great introduction to this topic.