This week was a lot of fun and included some really meaningful learning! This week, we continued our learning about different cultures around the world by looking at Hanukkah. This year, Hanukkah runs from November 28th to December 6th, so this week was the perfect time to learn about it! Students participated in (and helped each other solve) a Hanukkah word search. This sparked a lot of discussion about different vocabulary and terms associated with Hanukkah and was a great introduction to the holiday.
We also watched a video explaining the significance of the lighting of the menorah. This led to a menorah craft where students created what looked like a menorah in a window using construction paper and plastic wrap, of all things! These turned our great!
A Hanukkah colouring sheet was our morning warm-up activity on Tuesday and the students created some beautiful and colourful work! We ended our Tuesday with a read aloud of the book "The Magic Dreidels" and further discussed traditions and symbols of Hanukkah.
In language arts this week, we continued our Words Their Way sight words program with a new collection of words. We also continued with our spelling program - the students' spelling is certainly improving and this is wonderful to see! As well, we focused on punctuation and capitalization. When we wrote a letter on Tuesday, many students were applying this new knowledge - yay!
Speaking of writing a letter, perhaps your child told you about our exciting letter writing activity this week. On Tuesday, we each wrote a letter to Prime Minister Justin Trudeau! On Monday for social studies, we began learning about local Indigenous communities as part of our global communities unit that has been ongoing this term. We explored a great website, looking at the land (and loss thereof) of a local Indigenous group, the Stó:lō peoples. We also watched a video discussing the importance of names and language in
this culture. Finally, we read a picture book titled "Nibi's Water Song". This book looks at Canadian Indigenous communities and discusses the lack of clean drinking water in many of these communities. After reading this book, we discussed what we could do to make a difference for these communities. After the idea of writing a letter to the Prime Minister was brought up, there was so much excitement in the class that we had to do it! So, on Tuesday we all wrote a letter. The students folded them up and addressed envelopes to be mailed out. I will be mailing these letters this week and, hopefully, we will get a reply! This was a wonderful way for the students to see their impact on society through just one small action!
Some other fun things we did this week included practicing our song for the Winter Showcase with Ms. Sahota's class, exploring and selecting books form the library, fun games in P.E., and some buddy reading time. Overall, this week was wonderful!
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