This week in humanities students worked on finishing up their Town Planning assignment. We were very excited to share with you at the Celebration of Learning showcase, and are grateful you could join us! Please ask your child to share their planning Google Doc with you to see more of the hard work that went into the finished products. Students will complete an individual final reflection next week to wrap up the unit. Thank you to all the parent volunteers who came out on Tuesday and Wednesday to support our groups with skating. We enjoyed spending the afternoon exercising and getting a breath of fresh air! This week in science we finished up our work on our landfill proposals. As a part of our work students and the opportunity to provide feedback to their peers using the checklist shown below. Students then used this formative assessment information to review their presentations. In Math, students continued their work on Place Value, completing a place value check-in on Thursday. This showed us that we need to spend more time on writing numbers and going over Place Values above One Thousand. Students also practiced their mental math addition strategies when they played addition card games. Upcoming:
Feb. 2nd - All grade 4 & 5 students will attend the Calgary Philharmonic perform the classic children's tale "The Hockey Sweater.” Looking forward… We are excited to start our next unit focusing around our past and Alberta’s Indigenous People and perspective, while applying historical thinking skills.
0 Comments
Students began the week in math by showing us what they know about place value.If you would like to see this it is posted on FreshGrade under the name Place Value Check-In. Students completed a mini inquiry where they were asked "What is Place Value?", where they generated a group understanding of the definition of place value. Students then worked with base ten block manipulative to demonstrate their understanding. This week we welcomed Ms. Angela Romeril, a pre-service teacher, to 4.1 and 4.2 Math/Science. She is currently in her last semester at Mount Royal University and is enjoying getting to know the students at Connect. This week in Science, students began to work on their proposals for landfills. These landfills are going to become part of their humanities Town Proposals in an exciting cross curricular connection. In this assignment students were asked a series of questions about their proposed landfills, about the placement, environmental upkeep, and end use o the landfill property. Students will understand the main components of landfills and why they are important, as well as what is done with landfills after they are full. We will be interviewing an expert in the field of waste disposal next week with students' questions about Waste in our World. In humanities this week students have continued to work hard on their Town Presentations. We are excited to announce a celebration of learning to share our work on Thursday, January 26th. Please see attached invitation poster for more details! This week students reflected on their group work habits and shared the things that are working well and areas for improvement. Thank you for your comments in the parent feedback portion of this reflection. We value your involvement! Upcoming:
Skating - 4.2 & 4.4 on Tuesday Jan. 24th at 1:20 - 3:20pm Skating - 4.1 & 4.3 on Wednesday Jan. 25th at 1:20 - 3:20pm Thank you to the volunteers who have offered their time to tie skates and supervise our skating events! Book Club - First meeting on Wednesday Jan. 25th at lunch in the Learning Commons! This week in humanities fourth graders continued to work on their group town planning docs. Our week’s focus was around positive teamwork and communication! We have been encouraging students to apply collaborative strategies brainstormed throughout the year to help them be most successful in their groups. Watch for a parent comment sheet coming home soon to review and provide feedback on your child’s efforts! Upcoming:
January 16th - 4.3 and 4.4 welcome Ms. Santos, a pre-service teacher from Mount Royal University. Ms. Santos is in her final practicum, and is looking forward to working with the students in humanities! She will be with us until the end of April, and we are all excited to welcome her to Connect! January 25th - Book Club kick off! Grade 4/5 & 8/9 book club is designed to pair up younger students with older students who share a love of literacy and READ over lunch hour. Book club will happen on every Day 4 in the Learning Commons. All students welcome to sign up! February 2nd - Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra Field Trip. Parents interested in volunteering please check online for a post from our volunteer committee. Reminders: Please send your child to school dressed for the weather. As a school that promotes outdoor education, we encourage students to begin taking responsibility for dressing appropriately during the different seasons. Welcome back, and happy New Year everyone! We were excited to hear about our students’ holidays on Tuesday and are pleased to see everyone back happy, healthy, and ready to learn. In humanities this week, all grade fours had a chance to visit the library to renew and return their books. 4.1 & 4.2 began work on their term 2 goals this week (this can be found on google docs), and 4.3 & 4.4 worked on finishing up their persuasive advertisements from before the break. Fourth graders were put into their Town Planning Assignment groups this week and began setting up our shared google docs. This will be how student plan and collaborate to work on their projects for the rest of January. Each component of the project is broken up into 8 steps with due dates. Please be checking agendas and talk with your child about how their group is doing throughout the coming weeks! This week in Math students have begun their review on graphing. Students were challenged to find coordinates during a review Kahoot. Kahoot is an online review tool that works like a game show where students are challenged to answer multiple choice questions under a nickname. In Science, students have continued their work in the Waste and Our World unit and have begun exploring the concept of landfills. Students were asked to think critically about different persepectives of landfills when they watched two videos with conflicting opinions. One being made by a waste management company who builds and maintains landfills, the other being made by a concerned citizen group, highlighting some of the possible downfalls of landfills. Students then began to research more about the different types of landfills, as they will soon be creating a proposal for a landfill that will be included in their town proposals in Humanities. Bellow is a video about landfills and the new composting initiative in Calgary. This made by the city of Calgary and the students watched it at the beginning of the week. This week in humanities students have worked hard to complete their town proposals! Students collaborated to expand their understanding of the region they chose by sharing research and answering our thick questions together. We are excited to see how these towns are planned and developed after the break. Fourth graders also put their heads together to brainstorm “How natural resources are used by Albertans.” The resources we looked at were: Agriculture, Natural Gas, Oil, Forestry, and Coal. They generated a great list of ideas that we will continue to analyze in the New Year. Our second OT session with 4.1 & 4.3 was on Thursday where we learned about some helpful printing techniques. This week in humanities students spent time finishing up their Pax in 1 minute videos, town proposals, and working on developing vocabulary knowledge for the unit. Check out Freshgrade for new posts by your child and teacher feedback. Fourth graders have also continued to deepen their understanding of persuasive strategies during interactive and independent class activities. In reading, the grade fours participated in small group book circles where they shared about books, and practiced their summarizing skills and identifying the author's message or themes within the book. We also had an Occupational Therapist come in to teach 4.2 & 4.4 printing techniques and will be coming back on Thursday Dec. 15 to work with 4.1 & 4.3. She presented information and skills around print formation, size, spacing, and legibility. This week in Science we began an exciting new unit; Waste and Our World. Students began the unit by watching a short film called the Story of Stuff (video below). This began to introduce the problems with our current system of extraction, consumption and disposal. This weekend students will be working with their parents to calculate their Carbon Footprint to better understand their own consumption. Please see the list below for upcoming peace festival events coming up next week:
Please note that participation in any of these events is NOT mandatory. If for any reason your child is unable to participate, please do not hesitate to contact your child’s homeroom teacher. Toy Mountain Donations - Miss Glinsbockel’s family group is collecting new and unwrapped toys for Toy Mountain until Thursday, December 15th. School wide Stephen’s Backpacks Collection - please see the links below for more information and to sign up, or the paper handout sent home with your child (4.2). 4.3: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1Wvm2h6CBwf4c-3WBxOFo1BnIYuH-3EbQCKPHRNucRGk/edit?usp=sharing 4.4: https://docs.google.com/document/d/1qh7n2DNLxpMjzzXFIOtAqQ7OAupd_9iqrjVOB57eAqI/edit?usp=sharing OTHER: Visits to the Peace Festival in the gym: Tuesday Dec 12 @ 2:00 - 4.4 Wednesday Dec 13 @ 10:35 - 4.3 Wednesday Dec 13 @ 2:00 - 4.1 Thursday Dec 15 @ 9:00 - 4.2 During Peace Festival visits to the gym there will be activities designed by the grade 9 students around mindfulness and gratitude. There will also be a market featuring hand made gods from Nepal, students are welcome to bring money to purchase holiday gifts. *Some activities in the gym ask that students "give what they can". This could be a non-perishable food item or change. This is not mandatory and plans are in place for students ho do not have donations to ensure that everyone is able to participate. *** There may be other activities that students participate in during this time, including hearing from guest speakers, participating in a “Mindfulness Cafe” hosted by our grade 9s, baking for the community, or contributing to a collaborative quilt project. *** Thursday Dec 15 @ 7:00pm - Agents of Change Elective is hosting a film screening at the school. See the information poster in "Important Links & Docs" - We hope to see you there! Closing assembly in the gym - December 16 @ 2:00pm In humanities this week fourth graders continued their work on exploring Alberta’s 6 natural regions. We are using this information to propose where in Alberta a new town should be built based on the important details that would make the area a great place to live. Students are also beginning to think about what persuasive strategies are and how marketers use these to sway people into buying their products. Later, we will apply these strategies in writing and the town presentations to practice our own persuasive techniques! In wrapping up our class novel, Pax, the grade fours will be creating a one minute snapshot of the story using their summarizing skills to choose the top 10 moments from the novel and tell the story. This week in Math Science we have continued our work on our Tomatosphere graphs and our Blanacing Videos. Students had the opportunity to share their videos with the class and recieve feedback in the form of two stars and a wish from their peers. Students will have time next week to take this feedback and incorporate it into their videos. On Friday we once again took to the science alb to finaly transplant our tomato plants. Students had dirty hands and smiles as the continued to cultivate their growing plants. Thank you to everyone who came out to student led conferences last week! We were impressed by the turn-out and how well our grade 4s did presenting their learning to you. If you haven’t had the chance to provide feedback yet around our new SLC format, please contact the office!
Looking ahead...
This week in humanities our hearts were filled with emotion as we finished up our Global Read Aloud, Pax. Students were asked to think about why the author chose to write this story, and what lessons she was trying to teach us throughout Peter and Pax’s journey. Some deep themes came about in considering these questions, such as: "When you love something, sometimes you have to let it go". And, "No matter what the circumstances, you can always achieve your goals with determination". Also, "Sometimes things in life don’t go your way or turn out how you hope". And finally, "War is difficult for people and animals". This week students also completed a self-evaluation for their “Presenting Pax” projects where they were asked to reflect on their efforts of the picture and typed summary. Check it out on Freshgrade! In our Alberta inquiry, students have continued to dig into the important features of our 6 regions. We learned the difference between “Important” and “Interesting” information when determining importance in a text while reading, and talked about note taking strategies such as using: jot notes, our own words, keywords, and bullet points. Students got onto a virtual website called Zooming in Alberta: http://www.learnalberta.ca/content/sszi/en/ to explore more about Alberta’s climate, landscape, wildlife, plant life, etc. in each region. We have been recording this information in our Google Docs learning journals. Watch for this during student led conferences! In spelling we learned about the /J/ sound. We sorted words starting with the letters J & G to discover patterns in letter pairing and what that means for rules when we're spelling! Exciting News: All grade fours received a pair of personal earbuds to use at school for listening to virtual websites focused around our studies :) Fourth graders were given time to choose and practice the skills they want to showcase at the SLCs this week. We hope you enjoy sharing in our learning and come prepared to ask questions and encourage your child. We look forward to seeing everyone! Updates: - We will be having our first lockdown drill on Thursday morning, Dec. 1 - Term 2 starts on Monday, Nov. 28th - Ask your child about our Family Group theme: Gratitude & Global Citizenship This week in Math students continued to explore algebra moving from basic algebraic balancing to solving one step equations. Students have begun working on videos where they will have to explain their reasoning behind how they solved balancing equations. Students will have to explain the reasoning behind their math in the hopes that they will gain a better understanding of how algebra works. This week in science students continued their work with the tomato sphere plants, continuing to collect data. This week students were introduced to an APP called numbers, and learned how to transfer data into bar and line graphs. Starting next week, students will begin to take the data collected from Tomatosphere and present it using the numbers APP. This week in humanities we continued to read Pax and consider "What Do Good Readers Do?". We are excited to be finishing up the novel this week, and look forward to hearing the ideas students have about why this novel was written. This is our first look at theme in literature, and we have a feeling the students will come up with some morals from the story as well. On Monday we shared the pictures of our explorations throughout Alberta as a way to introduce some of the characteristics of our land. Look for these when you visit the school this week for student led conferences! On Tuesday we were lucky to host the group Teacher's Pet, who took us on an interactive race through Alberta. Students began to inquire into the characteristics of Alberta's different regions, and were challenged to think critically about where in our province a new town should be built. We look forward to continuing this line of thinking in the coming weeks. A huge thank you to all of the parents who joined us for this day, we couldn't have done it without you! Stay tuned for news about upcoming initiatives around the school as the holiday season approaches. We will continue to explore the themes of gratitude and global citizenship in family groups and other classes, providing us with the opportunity to give back to the community. In 4.3 and 4.4 Humanities we are happy to welcome a student teacher from the University of Lethbridge, Miss Shania Mack. Miss Mack is a humanities and drama specialist who will be with us until the Winter Break. Enjoy your practicum Miss Mack! Lastly, report cards are coming home Monday! Hard to believe term one is already coming to a close. Please be sure to read the comments from your child's teachers, as they will be the most informative. Details regarding student led conferences are coming home from our admin team early this week. Please note the following:
This week in Science students began collecting data in their Tomatosphere study. Students went in to lab daily to collect evidence of the germination of their tomato plants. In the coming week students will begin to see the link between Math and Science as they learn about graphs and begin to graph their Tomatoshpere data. This week in Math students continued their work on pre-algebra as they began to understand and explore the concept of balancing equation by looking at balancing shapes. Students were challenged to use their problem solving skills to compare the weights of various shapes placed on scales. An example from our work can be seen bellow. Ask your student to describe which shapes are heaviest and lightest and how they know.
|
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. Archives
June 2017
Categories |