Events:
- If Poetry competition winners + new contest
- Finished A Christmas Carol (book and the video)
- Finished Found Poetry and started simile poems
- 3 Little Pigs in French Class
- Began playing Hand Ball in P.E.
- Field trip to the Eco Park
- First rehearsal for “Lets Make It Happen” winter concert
- Second summative assessment (“Tracking the Trash”)
- Started preparing Student Council class rep speeches for Term 2
- Mathematics: mixed numbers, improper fractions, fractions and decimal remainders
- Finished U of I – How The World Works
One of the best things that we did this week was visiting the Eco Park. Our purpose of going to Eco Park it is related to our unit about how we manage solid waste. We went there to discover more about the trash cycle and learn more about recycling plastic bottles. The part I think is the most interesting to see and took the most time to make is the artificial landfill inside a big room. That landfill is like an example of what it will feel, look and sound like when we are in a real landfill. The pile of rubbish is really high and they look very real. Then we went to the “Plastic Waste Management Center”. There were university students who volunteered to introduce us to the management of plastics. They talked about the different types of plastic and what type can be recycled. Then, the students took us to a recycling plastic area. First, workers sort out the different types of plastic and put them into different containers, next we saw big machines, and they turn all those plastics into small black pellets.
Recently, we finished reading the book A Christmas Carol and also watched the movie of it. The main character of the story is called “Ebenezer Scrooge”. He is a cold-hearted, selfish man. He thinks Christmas is a humbug and refuses to go to any dinners with friends and never donates money to charity. So, one cold frosty night, his dead friend “Marley” (who is a ghost) came to haunt him and to teach him a lesson not to be so selfish and mean to everybody. Marley sent three ghosts for him: the first ghost is The Ghost of his Christmas Past, the second is The Ghost of his Christmas Present and the third is The Ghost of his Future. All the ghosts made him reflect on what he did wrong and gave him one last chance to change. At the end, after the hard lesson, he changed into a very jolly man and came to celebrate Christmas like everyone else. We read this book before our winter holidays, and some parts of the story were very scary.
I really like doing Found Poetry. Found Poetry is a type of poem using cut out words of phrases from magazines, and combine them to make a very interesting poem. First, we each chose a picture from a selection that Ms. Carmen gave us, and then we found some words that describe or refer to the picture as we understand it. Once we got enough words, we start putting the words into phrases to make poem lines. My picture reminds me about Qin Shi Huang’s (the olden days of the Chinese empire) clay soldiers that stayed with him in his tomb. This is a very interesting project because you don’t need to write anything, but instead just find random words that will work in your poem.
I enjoyed our first week of school from the winter break!
Karen Carmen