Milk bags

Ms. Harris and her group of weavers have been putting our milk bags to good use!

They have completed one mattress which will be sent off to be used in a country that needs them. (We are not sure where it will go yet)

It took over 1000 milk bags to complete this mattress. Our class collected more than half of them!
(note the hands holding up the mattress -- these are Grade 8 students -- this mattress is huge!)

Happy Father's Day!

  Happy Fathers Day to all of the men in our lives -- our dads, daddys, babas, uncles, grandfathers, papous, and great grandfathers!

We painted blocks of wood and attached some very close up photos to them. They looked amazing -- sorry that I can't show the finished products.

We worked with bright acrylic paints and worked on layering and then adding details.

Introduction to equations

We are learning how to balance equations.

We learned that the equal sign ( = ) means "the same as"

To introduce the word "equation" we read this book and made up some funny word equations.
These were from the book : "small + bottle = baby" and "tall + coffee = grown-up" 

We were all familiar with equations such as
2+3=5
but students had difficulty when we switched things around a bit 5 = 2+?
We had been relying on standard equations for too long!

We used an actual balance scale to physically balance cubes to find out what "balanced".

The Grade 2's learned how to balance in a more complicated way.
They tried equations like 5+2 = 4+? 
We learned to solve one side of the equation, and then solve the other side.
Our balance scale mat really helps to remind us how to solve the equations.