October 4, 2017

What a busy week we have had!

Yesterday we were lucky enough to have two special presentations in the afternoon. The first was our usual Souperstars program in which we learned about kitchen safety - specifically with handling knives in preparation for making our sub sandwiches next week. Students were told that they could bring extra food from home that they might want to add to the sub if they so desire. Non-pork meat options included chicken salad and tuna salad, so if your child may want an alternative to those options provided you are welcoming to send something to school in the morning.

We also had a weather presentation from Kevin Stanfield who is a CTV weather specialist. The students loved the presentation as it was very engaging and Mr. Stanfield was very entertaining. We even got to check out a cool website that showed the current weather patterns on Earth! You can check it out at home by visiting:

https://earth.nullschool.net/

We continued working on improving our writing and stretched sentences in LA, and had a discussion today that getting feedback from a peer or teacher should be a positive experience and that it is not meant to hurt anyone's feelings. Often students bring their work to show me or a peer their progress and when met with some constructive feedback on how to turn a 2 into a 3, or a 3 into a 4, it can seem surprising. We talked about how it's everyone's job to think about how we can grow and improve while at school, even Ms. Laird's! Feedback is just another way we learn.

In Math, we are getting ready to move on from ordering and comparing numbers and will have a quick informal assessment tomorrow that will give us that final push of information we need before picking up and moving on. Remember to practice reading numbers at home with your child as assigning the words to a number (for example - 202 456 Two hundred two thousand, four hundred fifty six) can be quite a challenge for a grade 5 student. Students in grade 4 are expected to be able to do the same skills for numbers up to 10 000.

We introduced our first project in social studies today and will be diving into that in further detail in class next week. Students are being asked to "sell" a Canadian city to European citizens who are looking to move to Canada after an imaginary shortage of natural resources in their home countries. Persuasive language and the understanding of how the region we live in affects our lives (economy, climate, lifestyle just to name a few) will be our ultimate goal. Students have been given choice on how to present their knowledge, but because this is our first research project, Ms. Laird may help make some guiding choices to ensure success for everyone.

Also, we have begun a class novel study, The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas. This is a story that we will be doing lots of discussion around to prepare students for as it is a sad tale, but timely for completion around Remembrance Day. Please e-mail me at crlaird@cbe.ab.ca if you have any questions about this book.

Reminders:
There is no school this Friday OR Monday due to a Professional Development day and Thanksgiving Monday.

Have a great night!