Thursday, November 30, 2017

November 30, 2017

Good afternoon families of room 18!

Here is a list of today's and yesterday's activities)! Students began the day with a DEAR period. We have been doing a lot of guided reading periods recently to work on strategies and gauge reading comprehension, so students were craving some free choice reading time.

After music, students came back to work on Math and we worked on a word problem that involves multiplication. We discussed additional strategies that students will need to use when solving word problems, instead of just having to use our computational strategies to solve the math. Next week, we will be having a 'Wonderful Word Problems Week!" in which we will put all that we have been working on in multiplication into creative scenarios. Part of what students will be introduced to as a result will be some division! Be prepared!

After recess, we moved into science and discussed the scientific project through a fun puzzle activity that Ms. Ryan planned. Students learned about the different parts of the scientific process and had to put them in order based on statements taken from the process itself.

After lunch, students reviewed two blogs they had completed a scavenger hunt on in order to learn about blogs, and moved on to completing a paragraph writing exercise from yesterday that was aimed at helping students support an overarching topic throughout 3 paragraphs. We wrote one as a class, and then students were asked to write one on their own.

As students are working on pulling important facts and information from a variety of text types that are based in social studies, they may come home and say they are working on a "project". For this, we are looking into the difference between natural and manmade disasters, and how these change our physical geography in Canada. It is really an ongoing assignment in class that involves LA and Social Studies concepts. Students first looked at the Halifax Explosion, and then at the Eastern Ice Storm of 1998. Coming up, they will be synthesizing the information they pulled out into news broadcasts that I am hoping students will be able to turn into iMovies next week. If not, as students will need time to write a script, they will present their broadcast on the carpet and I will record it with our classroom iPad.

Have a great night!

Monday, November 27, 2017

November 27, 2017

Dear families of room 18,

Today was an unusual day. We had some unplanned changes to our routine, which did not help, but students handled the changes as well as they could. During the morning, Ms. Ryan did a lesson on empathy. Students discussed how to work through challenges with other students using a process and how to recognize someone else's emotions. Afterwards, students were introduced to the parts and functions of blogs and researched what an effective blog looks like. After recess, we reviewed our math work and practiced our basic facts in preparation for a quiz tomorrow.

After lunch, we began the afternoon with guided reading before continuing a social studies lesson from last week. We then went to gym and then finished up the day with some reflection questions about what we have read so far in Wonder.

Grade 4/5 message:
Students in Grade 4/5 will now be having daily natural breaks instead of going out as an entire group in the mornings. This will enable the students to have time for a healthy snack and body break. Please speak to your classroom teacher if you should have any questions about this change.

Friday, November 24, 2017

November 24, 2017

Happy Friday families of room 18!

Today started out with our Pillars of care assembly. We want to congratulate our winners, Chloe, Cody, Abby, Sage!

After our assembly, Ms. Ryan started an art lesson that will incorporate some writing at a later date. Our art is a self-portrait inspired by the book Wonder. Students will be adding character traits and adjectives that describe themselves to the portrait at a later date.

After art, we had our bi-weekly basic facts quiz, and then Ms. Laird put a whole bunch of review questions up on the board. Students who did not complete these questions will have brought them home for homework. In between our math time, students had buddies and then came back to finish up.

At the end of the day we had a discussion about making good choices while Ms. Laird is away. I had to be at a board meeting yesterday and came back to a less than favourable report about student behaviour. We talked about how it doesn't matter what another person was doing, it matters what choices we make individually to contribute to our community.

We will start fresh on Monday with a wonderful day! Have a great weekend!

Wednesday, November 22, 2017

November 22, 2017

Dear families of room 18,

What a beautiful day we had inside and outside of BHS today!

We started the day off making music with Mr. Wiens in the music room followed by a continuation of our math groups with Ms. Ryan and Ms. Laird. Today was review for some students and extension for others. These groups will continue tomorrow, with a formative assessment review of these skills on Friday. Students have really been struggling with re-grouping across functions and so, we continue to reinforce this skill. After math, we went to Phys. Ed.

After recess, we moved into a social studies based lesson that introduced a new graphic organizer that we will be using throughout the year to help us glean important facts and details from a variety of text types. We've been using language to differentiate between types of information that are "nice to know" vs. information that we "need to know". By the end of the lesson, we were having quite an engaging conversation on how human actions have influenced the Cordillera region.

Right after guided reading, we had a fire drill! It was perfect weather for a fire drill, but we had to trek through some pretty deep snow to get to our meeting spot. After we had come back in from outside, we began to put all of the parts of writing a proper paragraph together by writing our first complete opinion paragraph to answer the question "Should students be in school for 12 months of the year?"

Our Pillars of Care winners have been announced for the month of November!!! Congratulations go out to:
Care for Learning - Chloe
Care for Place - Cody
Care for Self - Abby
Care for Others - Sage

Reminders:
- Fun Lunch is tomorrow
- There IS school on Friday
- Send in your Movember votes!
- Popcorn continues to sell at recess!

Monday, November 20, 2017

November 20, 2017

Dear families of room 18,

Welcome back to another full week at Beddington Heights! Here is a recap of what we did today in room 18!

We started the day by submitting our votes for the Pillars of Care assembly that will be happening this Friday at 8:15. We then followed up with a vote for Movember, as Ms. Laird will be donating a vote for each student in the class towards our Movember campaign. She really wants to see someone dye their hair pink! After this we went to music with Mr. Wiens.

After music, we had math. We got to practice our multiplication facts by playing Multiplication Battleship while Ms. Laird and Ms. Ryan worked with small groups to target areas of need around multi-digit addition, subtraction, and those who are still struggling with some forms of multiplication. We will be continuing to do this work over the next week so that students who require support will have a chance to sit down a few times with an adult to work through challenges.

After recess, Ms. Laird provided the last ever opportunity to finish up our Social Studies centers. This was a result of the serious and hard work students had been putting into the centers last week. They made the case for one extra period of work so that they could finish as much as possible and were granted that request on Thursday because of the shortened week. We will have a quick quiz to follow up with some of the "big" ideas in this unit so far later this week.

During science, students analyzed the data from our classroom temperature readings and made some connections about why some places in the classroom are warmer/cooler than others. We had some very interesting data collected from places like the storage room, the smart board and by the computer cart. After that, we had gym.

To finish off the day, Ms. Ryan introduced the idea of concluding sentences for paragraphs and had the students do an interesting activity with concluding sentences.

Apologies go out as the blog continues to go out at a funny hour. There seems to be some inconsistency as to how the blog is being sent out around the school and all the solutions we have been given have not seemed to fix the issue.

Reminders:
- Pillars of Care Assembly
- Fun Lunch is on Thursday, Nov. 23rd

Mavericks are selling $2 a bag, 11:30-11:55am (first half lunch only) in room 19. All proceeds go towards our school and various charities both local and international.

7 Flavors to start:
-Say cheese cheese
-White cheddar
-Dill pickle
-Jalapeno jack
-Buttersalt
-Salt and vinegar
-Low-fat caramel

Monday, November 13, 2017

November 13, 2017

Good afternoon families of room 18!

Today was a busy Monday in our classroom. We started off by running down to music! Once we returned to the classroom, we jumped straight into math and 1 digit by multi-digit multiplication. Students were given multiplication charts, if needed, to practice the traditional algorithm method of solving multiplication. This was review for grade 5 students, but will be beneficial to getting them into 2 by 2 digit multiplication soon.

After recess, we continued on with our social studies centres and will hopefully be wrapped up this week. Students have been very creative in connecting their learning about the interior plains region to the cordillera region through their story writing. Many have chosen to create chapters of the same story set in the different region.

After lunch, we moved into guided reading. We have altered the look of our guided reading block with each group being assigned a novel to read. They now have tasks that they will be completing independently during guided reading time if they are not reading with Ms. Chen, Ms. Ryan or myself. Once guided reading was finished, students moved into an introductory lesson on paragraphs and topic sentences. This is hard work and students will be practicing and unpacking these ideas over the next few weeks as we get ready for the official beginning of our unit on expository writing. Woohoo!

We finished the day off with a quick punctuation quiz and a classroom meeting about safety on the playground before dismissal.

Reminders:
- Please sign up for Student Involved Conferences using your MyCBE account
- No school this Friday
- Scholastic Book orders are being accepted until the end of the month

Wednesday, November 8, 2017

November 8, 2017

Hi families of room 18!

Today we spent some time reflecting on Remembrance Day. We looked at a website at the end of the day that has been designed by Telus that lists the names of 117 000 Canadian veterans and donates $5 to the Royal Canadian Legion once you've scrolled through the whole list. It was a very powerful discussion and students were very interested to see if their family names were listed on the website. I told them that I would the provide the website to families in the blog tonight in case they would like to share it with you:

https://community.telus.com/remember/

This morning we had some science review to see how ready students are for a science test. We will be continuing with some review prior to the test, but the test date has not been set as we are still trying to figure out our schedule now that Ms. Ryan is with us. After recess we began creating our Remembrance Day wreath and almost finished it but will need to add a few more poppies prior to it being finished.

During the afternoon, we spent some time getting to know our new guided reading books and then had the challenge of solving as many contractions in 15 minutes as we could. Many students were able to accurately solve all 36 contractions on the board and describe how the patterns helped solve them. Students then got to play fitness monopoly in gym with Mr. Sadowski.

Have a great night!

Tuesday, November 7, 2017

November 7, 2017

Hello families of room 18!

Yesterday we welcomed our student teacher Ms. Ryan to our class. She will be with us for 6 weeks and will slowly be taking on more responsibility as time goes by. We look forward to working with her before winter break!

These past two mornings, students began to review their multiplication facts. Grade 4 students practiced their 4 digit addition and subtraction and then played a card game with the grade 5s called multiplication war. If you have a deck of cards at home, you should ask your child to teach you! Our quizzes from last week are marked and ready to come home, I have just been waiting to have the final few students write their quiz before I hand them back as we had several students away on Friday. I will have the students remind me to give them their quizzes tomorrow as they are my best strategy for not forgetting important information.

Today we had our first lockdown practice of the year and our class did fairly well! We had some sillies while waiting in the science storage room, but when you're sitting in a pitch black room with 25 other people, that is to be expected the first time you practice. We discussed strategies that we can use the next time we have a lockdown drill to help us focus and remain quiet in our hiding place.

We continued with our new set of social studies centres after recess. Students who have presented their social studies projects have been handed back their rubrics and should have brought them home to show you by now. Tomorrow will be a science day and students will be participating in Weather Watch review in preparation for our end of unit quiz.

This afternoon we had a presentation from Ms. Lucy from Souperstars and students had the opportunity to cut up vegetables and fruit and then eat a snack bag full of veggies. Our room smelled wonderfully healthy! After this presentation, Ms. Ryan helped students apply all of their punctuation and dialogue tag knowledge to the editing process.

Reminders:

* Our Remembrance Day Ceremony will begin at 10:30 this Friday. Please join us if you are available.
* Student involved conferences are next week on Thursday evening and Friday morning. Bookings will begin on Monday through your My CBE Account.
* No School November 17th

Thursday, November 2, 2017

November 2, 2017

Hi families,

Here is a message from Mr. Sadowsky about the Beddington Movember event:

Beddington Heights is showing we care by running a Movember competition to bring awareness to and raise funds for prostate cancer research. Most of our male staff members will be growing a moustache for the month of November. Students may vote all month as often as they like for who they feel has the worst moustache. The cost is $1.00 per vote. $5.00 = 5 votes etc. Mavericks will be set up in the gym at lunch on Tuesdays and Thursdays to collect votes. You may also give your vote to Mr. Sadowsky at any other time. All proceeds will be donated to the Movember foundation on behalf of Beddington Heights school. At the end of the month, the teacher with the most votes, therefore the worst moustache will come to work on December 1st with his hair dyed in a bright funky colour. If we raise $1,000.00 or more as a school, all the participants will dye their hair on December 1st.
Let's show everyone how much Beddington cares.
Thank you for your support!

Participants: Mr. Hebert, Mr. Weins, Mr. Sadowsky, Mr. Lancee, Mr. Mueller, Mr. Shackelton, Mr. Softley, Mr. Berry,
Mr. Mahon, Mr. Beechey, Mr. Jackson

I apologize profusely about not getting to blog yesterday! If you have any questions that go unanswered, please let me know!

We have now finished most of our Social Studies presentations and completed rubrics will be sent home with students tomorrow. I was really impressed at how some students were able to weave in so much information while maintaining the theme of the project! We discussed how to improve upon our work for next time and to use class research time more efficiently. For the next week we will be focusing on summarizing our social studies knowledge in preparation for moving on to our next unit.

Today in math we reviewed 4 digit and 5 digit addition to compliment our work with rounding and in preparation for moving on in our number unit. Students had fun challenging each other at the whiteboard today. Tomorrow there will be a small quiz which will actually be sent home on Monday. Our last quiz was really a formative assessment piece for me, so once I had it I could direct our learning.

Yesterday in science we spent some time talking about temperature and the factors that affect temperature. We then took some thermometers and made some predictions about where we would find the warmest and coolest spots in our classroom. Students taped thermometers to those spots and have been periodically taking temperature readings to see how even the temperature inside the school can fluctuate. We will be working on reviewing our science knowledge next week in preparation for a unit test.

Finally, in Language Arts, students have been practicing attribution tags and quotation marks in writing. We have been using comic strips to practice this skill and looking at how to insert the tags at the beginning, middle, and end of quotes with proper punctuation while using a variety of tags "instead of said". We've seen some pretty creative uses of alternatives to said and I am excited to see how students insert these into their narrative writing later on this year.

Reminders:
-Our veterans food drive has now begun, if you are able to send in non-perishable food items - please do!
-Our Movember campaign continues and there are some pretty terrible mustaches being nurtured by the male staff of Beddington Heights


Have a safe and snowy evening!

Monday, June 25, 2018

Good afternoon families of room 18! Here is a recap of today! We started our day out with pillars of care nominations! The winners will ...