What a beautiful week of weather! I imagine many of you have been outside enjoying those last few warm evenings before the cooler days of fall set in. The students have been working very hard in their first four weeks of school. I can't say enough how impressed I am with their enthusiasm and eagerness to learn. Thank you so much for your support during Strong Beginnings. It's such a great opportunity to sit down with your children one-on-one, not only to assess their learning strengths and needs but also to engage with them on a personal level. With the Terry Fox Run wrapping up our week, we've started in on some new "Grade 5" work (as the students like to say!)at the beginning of the week.
So here's what we've been up to and what is coming up:
LANGUAGE ARTS:
In preparation for our novel study on "The Birchbark House", the students have been learning about how to RESPOND to literature. We had fun on Tuesday learning the difference between RETELLING and RESPONDING using Oreos (AGAIN!!). It was yummy and effective. Please ask your child what they had to do! Today, the students were introduced to our TARGETS when responding and we practiced using the class read aloud, "There's a Boy in the Girls' Bathroom" by Lois Sachar. I thought it would be fun to allow the students to show you what responding looks like by posting their responses onto the blog. Over the weekend, I've asked the students to send a "comment" to the blog (which goes to my e-mail address first) and then I will choose a few to post to the blog.
Many students are almost finished their Canadian author novels and are ready to begin the book report and float. Next week, we will begin the writing of the book reports and designing our floats. I've asked the students to try to finish their books over the weekend and bring in an empty shoebox by Tuesday.
MATHEMATICS:
This week, we continued our work on graphing. The students played "What's in a Name?" and graphed the values of the names of their classmates. It was a great review of designing a bar graph.
If you haven't already been surveyed, your son or daughter will be approaching you this weekend with their survey questions about your "FAVORITES". Our next target in Math is to learn how to create a double bar graph. The students will be comparing the results of their questions between their female and male participants. We should have some interesting conclusions to draw from the results as we graph them next week!
Daily conditioning has also begun this week! At the beginning of every math class, the students are given a set of 15 questions orally. We have begun by reviewing our addition facts and will move into multiplication shortly. Have your child explain how conditioning works. I call it our "warm up" for math class!
SOCIAL STUDIES:
"What IS history?" was our topic of discussion this week. The students brainstormed their thoughts and ideas about what history means and tried to answer the question "How do we know about the long ago past?". An important concept to understand when learning about history is DIFFERENT PERSPECTIVES. Ask your child what that means and what lesson did Mrs. Eby do to make them understand?
SCIENCE:
We had fun exploring the website links on the side of our blog to review the different systems in our body and viewed a funny video about making wise nutritious food choices to introduce our unit on Nutrition. Thank you for the food flyers that you have brought in. We will be using them in a hands on activity next week to explore Canada's Food Guide.
ART:
Our first study in Art will be exploring the work of the Group of Seven. We began by viewing and discussing their paintings and learned a bit about the artists themselves. They were famous for their interpretation of northern Canadian landscape and the mysterious death of their "eighth member" Tom Thompson! The students will be working with oil pastels to reproduce one of their favorite paintings of the Group of Seven. Their final reproduction is always quite a masterpiece!
OTHER:
- What a beautiful afternoon for the Terry Fox Run! Thank you for all your generous donations! Did I capture your legs in action in the photos on the sidebar?
- Book orders should be in soon as the October flyers have just arrived on my desk!
Have a great weekend!! Let's pray that sun is here to stay for a little while longer!
Mrs. Eby
1 comment:
I could fell how scared he was when he was running to the girls bathroom!One thing I actually didn't expect is that Bradly would actually go into the girls bathroom. R.B.
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