Friday, February 2, 2018

Good afternoon families,

Here is a recap of what students were up to in room 18 over the past few days. Apologies for my absence yesterday, I appreciate your understanding as the students worked through the day with Ms. Locke and Mr. Strum in my stead.

Math:
Students completed a math quiz yesterday on division and were asked to complete the quiz using whichever method worked for them. These quizzes will be marked for Monday so that they can come home and be viewed by you, please ask your child if they don't volunteer to show you on their own. I also found out about a new strategy that Mr. Jackson was trying with students encountering challenges in his class called "Friendly Numbers". It is a really great way of using multiples that are accessible to students, such as 5/10/50/100, to break the dividend down as much as possible prior to needing to access their basic facts with the now, more manageable dividend. This method was introduced to the class today briefly, after the results of our quiz, we will see if it needs to be a class-wide strategy.

Social Studies:
Students have now completed the introduction to Confederation. They should be able to list at least 3 reasons why Confederation was a good idea, and some of the challenges that needed to be overcome in order to accomplish this goal. Ask your child if they can list the four colonies that were the first colonies to join Confederation.

Science:
We had lots of fun this week with experiments around mixtures. We started earlier this week by looking at types of mixtures using six different liquids to create solutions and suspensions. Today, we had the chance to work with Mr. Jackson to create a suspension in the form of oobleck which was really fun. Next week, we will be looking at different methods of separating mixtures.

Language Arts:
Students who did not finish their procedural writing will need to have this done this weekend as they will be marked. Our goal is to now move on to creative writing using the tools we have accumulated during our expository writing unit.


Phys. Ed:
Gymnastics is now finished! Congratulations to the girls who won Mission Impossible!

Have a fabulous weekend!