Musical Ride and City Slickers!

Our school was so lucky this week to be visited by the Lord Strathcona Musical Ride! This was a first for me and it was so amazing! We were first visited by a soldier who explained the history and tradition behind the musical ride. Back in the days of Battles on Field the musical ride routine was actually training for battle maneuvers!

And we were also lucky with weather! The sun was shining bright as we enjoyed the show and got to visit with the stars afterwards!

In Language Arts we are continuing with our Daily 5 routines, Read to Self and Work on Writing. This week our reading strategy focus was: Determining Importance - I can judge what information from the text is important for me to understand. We introduced this strategy while reading a non-fiction article about Endangered and Extinct animals and our impact as humans on them. This was our theme in our KidBlog Posts this week as well! Check our your child's blog here.
Students did responses to reading discussing which animal they'd like as a pet, as well as, a short research paragraph about an animal.

With Work on Writing, this week we discussed what type of things we can write about. As a class, we brainstormed topics and created and IDEA JAR! In this jar each student created a topic that can help you out when you are stumped during Free Writing time. We then worked on our writing stamina by writing about one of our topics for 8 minutes straight!

In Science, we did a few experiments using rollers. In groups, students worked to create a simple machine that would move their book across their desk with rollers. They had 8 minutes to scour the room and the results were pretty fantastic!

After each group presented their new invention we talked about what worked best and what made it difficult to move the book across. We realised rollers work best when they are the same size, a little bit spaced out and have some sort of raining to keep them in place. We also compared a wheel to a roller and completed venn diagrams on google drawings.

In Social, we discussed how to read a legend based on landforms in a region and longitude and latitude. We discussed the major lines on our earth - horizontally is our Equator, vertically is our Prime Meridian. These lines separate our earth into Northern and Southern Hemispheres (along the Equator) and Eastern and Western Hemispheres (along the Prime Meridian). Students created their own little globes with all these lines and then we explored!
As a group, we brainstormed different landmarks and interesting cities in our world. Once we learned about longitude and latitude and how they separate our earth we checked out these locations GPS!

As a challenge, see if your student can explain why some numbers are negative and some are positive!








City Slickers was an absolute blast! We spent the morning dodging cow patties and learning how the cows eat and are milked on the Jesperson Farm. We also attended sessions about auctioneers, canola oil harvesting and uses, barley harvesting and uses, Alberta Health (healthy eating and Canada Food Guide), Alberta Rat Prevention and Alberta Trappers.

We also got to hold cute little chickies!!! 

Not to mention, we received some cool shades! Thank you City Slickers Program!