October 2, 2017

Good afternoon families,

We started this morning with a period of read to a friend and discussing the goals and reasons behind reading to a friend. We talked about how this helps us develop our fluency and expression, and has been identified as a goal for many students that have read with Ms. Laird.

Next we moved into a health lesson in which we discussed understanding and expressing our feelings. This will be an ongoing discussion over the next week as we try to better understand how our actions can have a positive or negative impact on others, especially when solving interpersonal problems. We also discussed strategies for dealing with our feelings and how these strategies can be different for different people or can even be triggers for some, as in the case of taking a break/walking away. We briefly touched on the idea of positive stress/negative stress and how building stress can affect our overall health and wellbeing.

During math, students were given their mathletics logins and explored the new platform of mathletics. Feel free to access mathletics from home for extra practice!

In Social Studies we discussed the connection between People and Regions. We looked at how the characteristics of a region (climate, landforms, natural resources) influence job choice, housing design, clothing, and transportation. Students had to list what they would want to wear, drive, do for fun, in an ideal situation, and then see if it's realistic that such a region exists in Canada or the world.

During the afternoon students worked on improving the quality of their writing through stretching sentences. This was difficult work as we often assume that what we know in our head is translated into our writing. Students were asked to consider if their reader would have questions that were not answered from their writing, such as "Who, What, Where, When and Why", and answer them if missing.

Reminders:
- Oct. 6th: NO SCHOOL - PD day
- Oct. 10th: NO SCHOOL - THANKSGIVING
- Library books due tomorrow

Accidents Happen! Message from the office:
We are looking for donations of gently used pants, from size 4 up to 16, or, youth XS to youth XL. Accidents happen, be it the bathroom variety or a seam splitting, and currently we have no pants to help students in such a situation. If you have extra taking up space at home, we will gladly take them off your hands. Thank you.