WHAT'S UP IN 5E?: HAPPY VALENTINE'S DAY!!

I'm writing this week's blog on Thursday as I know tomorrow is going to be a wild and fun day! I am also spending the weekend in Assessippi (leaving at 3:30pm sharp, according to my husband!), for my 7 year old daughter's Husky Snow Star downhill ski race. It should be an amazing experience as Nancy Green herself, will be attending the race and giving pointers to our "rising Canadian ski stars"! Even I'm excited to meet a Gold winning Canadian Olympic athlete. I'll have to remember to take lots of pictures!

Enough about me...here's what we've been up to and what is coming up:

LANGUAGE ARTS:

All week we've been "tuning up" our public speaking skills with fun gesture drills, impromptu practice speeches and a fun tongue twizzler (twister) competition! The students are getting pretty pumped up about our first T.U.S.C. meeting on Thursday, Feb.19th! Thank you for reading through their TUSC duotangs and signing them so promptly. It's a big committment but TONS OF FUN!

Today, the students were introduced to our selection of novels for our Literature Circle on HEROES. I will be placing the students into groups and they will be receiving their novels to begin reading and responding over the "Louis Riel" long weekend. Our first halfway point literature circle meeting is TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 24TH which gives the students a good head start and plenty of time to read and respond.

I love the Valentine's Book reports! The students have put in a lot of T.L.C. this month. I look forward to reading them. With Literature Circles beginning next week, the students are not required to respond in their Reading Logs for the next 2 weeks, as all of their reading and responding will be centered around their LC novel! I can hear the students cheering already!

MATHEMATICS:

With our decimals unit behind us, we have ventured into another problem solving strategy, "Using an Organized List". We are on our fourth practice problem this week, and the students seem to be catching on to the technique. It's a tricky strategy which requires some mental math skills! I would like to assess this strategy with a quiz next week...probably Thursday, Feb.19th so we can big our FRACTION FUN unit!

SOCIAL STUDIES:

We've finished off our quick study of the Viking Explorers with our quiz today! We had a lot of fun yesterday playing "Viking Jeopardy". I think I "dated myself" when so few students had ever watched Jeopardy and were unfamiliar with the game show style!

Our next focus in Canadian History is "The age of Exploration" , learning about the group of European explorers who came 400 years later to make their claim on Canadian soil!

SCIENCE:

It's been all about Physical Changes this week as we began exploring the various TYPES of physcial changes that can take place all around us. We discussed reversible and irreversible changes and the concepts of "expansion and contraction". On Tuesday, we had a blast with the physical change of "size and shape" as the students turned a regular piece of paper into a hole that they could walk through. Check out the pictures on the sidebar of the blog!!

We will continue to explore various Physical Changes next week before we begin our study of Chemical Changes!

FRENCH:

The students family trees look fantastic! I can see they have a firm grasp of the vocabulary necessary to express the different members of the family and use the correct possessive adjectives. We will be continuing with our unit of "La famille" next week as we work on our various pages to include in our final project... creating a family scrapbook!

OTHER:

We're looking forward to a fun and festive Valentine's Day celebration tomorrow! Thank you to all the parents that were able to contribute to our class party on Friday. We will be guessing the babies on Friday so your precious, adorable baby photos will be coming home soon!

The "Reading is Everywhere" bulletin board is up across from the office! There are close-up photos of different reading material that the students are trying to guess over the course of the month. Come and take a peek! Keep working on those bingo cards.

Super Lunch was a great success today. Thank you to our parent volunteers who were able to supervise over the lunch hour (very much appreciated!).

Tri-conferences are coming up! Please submit your preferences for appointment times as soon as possible as our secretary begins filling in the slots as they come in!