Happy New Year!

Welcome back!

I hope everyone's holiday was nice and restful! Back now for 3 days and it seems like Christmas was a long while ago....

We've been busy! Here's the summary:

Writing:
We've been talking about introductions, conclusions and stretching out our sentences. We've examined a variety of ways to start a story and how authors use their introductions to wrap up their writing with a "wrap around conclusion". This week, we examined expanding our sentences by asking a variety of questions. We did a few as a class, in small groups and independently and today, we turned to our own writing. The children were asked to identify sentences that were "shrunken" and try to stretch it out after we played around with two examples. The children are now into our Writer's Workshop routine and all have appointed days to conference with me. This is one on one time where they get to share part of what they are working on. We talk about the strengths of their piece and identify 1-2 things that they may need to try, revise or edit. 

Reading:
We continue to work on building connections. Before Christmas, I shared a matrix with the class - it identified what I was looking for when I graded their connections. I think they are starting to realize that they cannot connect to anything (ex. the girl has a red shirt, so do I) - their connections need to help them better understand the text. Now, to work on expanding the explanations in order to deepen the understanding.....!

We will also start to work on identifying the main idea and supporting details in both fiction and non-fiction text. This is an important skill, particularly as they get older. 

As many of you have noticed, we also started a 30 day book challenge. The goal of the challenge is to expose the students to a variety of genres that they may not normally choose to read. We've been gradually looking at different genres and their traits. In general, I try to read a couple of examples to them and have them form connections to the examples that we examine.

Math:
Continuing to build on patterning, numeracy and operations! Some students are working on representing double digit addition using the base ten blocks and representing it using pictures, numbers and expanded form (ex: 24's expanded form is 20+4) both with and without regrouping (everyone's working at their own pace), while other groups are working on triple digit addition/subtraction with and without regrouping while still others are working on double digit multiplication.

For some, we've learned a little about perimeter through patterning. I asked the children to identify a pattern through the perimeter of squares - what's the perimeter when you have one square? What about when you add a 2nd square and they are stuck together? How about a third? My hope is that eventually, we can connect this back to algebraic thinking and ask - what's the relationship between the number of squares vs. the perimeter?

This group, a group of students worked on double and triple digit addition/subtraction questions with 1 unknown number. We started off simple:
2+  £     = 6

Knowing that,

£ + 2 = 6

6 -  £     = 2

6 - 2 = £

We tried applying it to larger numbers. It's still a concept that needs practice, but they are starting to feel a little more confident. Once they have addition and subtraction down, we'll work on seeing whether they can identify the relationship between multiplication and division!

Science:
Grade 3's are beginning a unit on Structures and Materials. Yesterday, we examined a bunch of different structures from around Canada and talked about the shapes and materials that we thought might be used. Towards Spring Break, we will be (hopefully), constructing our own bridges. The BC Engineers usually host a Bridge building competition around that time, and it is my hope that someone in the class will be interested in participating! Who knows, perhaps we have some future Iron Ring-ers in the class?!

The Grade 4's are still working on their unit on Weather. They will be having a quiz on Tuesday (I told them what was on it - they should have notes!). Once we finish this quiz, there will be a few lessons on animals and weather and the unit will be pretty much finished. I will be asking them to do a cumulative project at the end. I don't anticipate that the project will be a large one, but it will require a bit of research and they will be required to present it to the class.

Social Studies:
The class will be going to the Cannery in Richmond - relates to our Socials curriculum, particularly about Community (grade 3) and First Nations (grade 4). More details to come!

Happy Holidays!

Hi All,

WHOA. Where did the time go??? I can't believe we're at December 18th!

This won't be a complete post - will try to post later. I'm trying to squeeze in a few bits of information before I forget:

1) PJ Day Friday - we will be attending our annual pancake breakfast on Friday morning

2) Glue sticks - I'm asking the children to bring in another glue stick or two in the new year.. for some reason, our glue stick supply is almost depleted. I haven't figured out where they've all disappeared to but I hope I can get to the bottom of it soon.. it's left me a bit perplexed!

3) Report cards - signed envelopes are due back to school on Thursday. 

4) We are still carrying on with academics.. business as usual!

Happy Holidays!

Time is flying!!

Yikes! Where did the time go? Tomorrow is December!!!

It's been a pretty busy few days. We started a new unit on Inferring in language arts. On Wednesday, we took our flashlights to the museum (gym). It was "after hours", but we still wanted to see the artwork of Harris Burdick. I shared with them that Harris had donated these pieces of art and was suppose to bring the stories that went along with them, but he suddenly disappeared. It was our job to come up with our own ideas as to what his illustrations are depicting. The class had great fun walking around the gym looking at the pictures, reading the titles and captions that went along with the pictures. We had a brainstorming session about what each of the pictures meant and I can already tell that we'll be getting some terrific stories out of them.

The grade 3's have pretty much finished their Science Unit on the Solar System. We completed a little booklet of constellations which was great fun and also will be a nice little reference for them in the future. 

The grade 4's are still working on Weather. Their weather booklets are due next Friday as they've had plenty of time to complete them. We put together a graph to track the data that we will be collecting with our rain gauges next week and also read (while identifying non-fiction text features and highlighting main ideas) about weather vanes in preparation for making them next week. 

Yesterday, a fruit/vegetable tracking sheet should have gone home. The students have been playing "What Am I" to learn more about different fruits/vegetables. We also worked on identifying different different coloured vegetables and fruits. 

A heads up:
Christmas concert is being held on December 18th. Our class' theme is "rock and roll". I will be asking the children to brainstorm an easy costume (ie. using  things you find around the house or from the dollar store)  and getting them to write a paragraph about their costume for homework (why not integrate some writing into it? Just for fun! :) ). 

No school Monday - the district is closed in lieu of having Easter during Spring Break! 

Alright. This post was begun last night and is still sitting here and it's now Saturday morning. I'm hitting publish! Have a great long weekend!

Rainy days...

Hi All,

Just realized it's been a while since I posted. Before I tell you about what's been happening in Division 4, I just wanted to talk a bit about upcoming report cards, particularly, for the grade 4's.

I think I've talked to most of the grade 4 parents about how your child will be receiving grades for the first time in their academic careers this term. The letter grades that will be provided are NOT interpreted in the same manner that we interpreted A's, B's, C's of even F's in school 10-15+ years ago. Here are the descriptors:

A = Excellent or Outstanding performance (ie. exceptional, above and beyond)
B = Very good performance
C + = Good performance
C = Satisfactory performance
C- = Minimally acceptable performance

Particularly in the first (and 2nd) term, most of what we do is highly scaffolded. This means, that the steps in completing an assignment, are broken down and explained, walked through one at a time. A lot of the work we complete depends on adult support and teacher instruction. Teacher instruction will always be there, however, the expectations for completing work independently will change over time. For example:
In socials, the grade 4's have begun to learn about First Nations groups in Canada. They have been working with an information sheet and a map to correlate where each group has been situated in Canada. I had to provide quite a bit of guidance in terms of how to read the map (boundary lines, review of colour codes and legends, directionality, etc.) and how to extrapolate information from the text in order to find answers. 

Summing up, I've told the students that they need to drop the idea that they will be "straight A" students. It's absolutely something they should strive for, however, they also need to be realistic at the same time. Balance is key! I told them that they should definitely aim for the B/C+ range and to remember, that a lot of the grade may stem from adult support. 

The 2nd piece to letter grades is that students will be assessed for work habits. This means that they complete their work, come prepared for class, exhibit good effort, work cooperatively, stay on-task, etc. The self-reflecting each week has helped to remind the students of the traits of a good learner (emphasis on learner and not student - I like to remind me that these skills are even relevant to adults and how we are always working to improve on these areas, even me!) Work habits are given either a G for Good, S for Satisfactory or N for Needs improvement.

If you have any questions regarding upcoming reports, please let me know!

In other news:

Math - We've been working on place value and patterning. In place value, the emphasis has been on representing numbers in multiple ways. For some students, we need to take it down a level and solidify their understanding of trading 10 units for 1 ten rod (you could also think of it as trading 10 pennies for 1 dime). For others, they have the understanding that 1- ten rods is the same as 1 hundred flat, but are not quite convinced that 10 hundreds makes 1 thousand or that 10 thousand cubes is 10 thousand (and not 1 million!). 

The other day, we also had a conversation about the "=" sign. I asked the students if the statement  2+6=4+4 was true or false? Many of them said it was false. It lead to the discussion of what does equals mean? The majority said that it meant "the answer is coming". I have now temporarily banned the words "equals" and "plus". From now on, equals is "the same as" and plus is "and". I reminded them that most of them learned that plus was "and" when they worked with Mrs. Sproul in Kindegarten .. was happy to get the response "Oh yea!! I remember that!". 

Sometimes, we go off on Math tangents. I am constantly amazed at how many connections there are in Math. On Parent Math night, Mrs. Bletcher will be sharing some of the activities we do in Math which will hopefully help you to better understand how one hands-on activity can deepen student understanding in so many strands of Math. 

Language Arts - The class has been working hard on developing strategies for Reading Comprehension. Last week, we read the story "Nothing Ever Happens on 90th Street". This story was about a girl who was asked to write something in her notebook, but felt that she had nothing to write. She discovers that she can use a variety of strategies to help her generate ideas: stretch the truth, make something up, look around her, etc. I asked the students to make predictions based on the cover and then another prediction after I read the first page. The goal with this is for students to understand that a story's characters, problem and setting is usually introduced early on in the story. Students were also asked to respond to the ending (many had difficulty with this - I got a lot of thin summaries rather than responses) and to identify what the author wanted them to remember about the story. This will be a graphic organizer that we will use a few more times until students start to develop a deeper understanding of it's purpose. 

This past week we also started practicing connecting. I sent them with a graphic organizer to the library, however, I think we need a review about connections. For some, they've been connecting for a number of years ago. I would say the majority of the class needs to remember:
1. Connections are not one sided. They cannot only state their part, they need to also talk about what part of the story sparked their memories. 
2. What is the purpose of your connection? If you say that the character in the story has blue shoes and you have blue shoes too, how does that help you better understand the story?
I touched on that briefly yesterday when I was reading our read aloud. The book had just described how the mother frog was fussing over her son before his departure - many of the children said that they could identify with this. We talked about the purpose of being able to connect with Gilbert's situation - it helped us understand how he felt without him having to spell it out for us!

Science - The grade 3's have finally finished up their little flap books on each of the planets. They are creating a lap book of different components of the solar system. They look fantastic! It will be exciting when they finally get to share it with you. We will be jumping into constellations and meteors next and that will be pretty much the end of the unit. It looks like we're just in time - our field trip to HR McMillan is coming up soon. (The grade 4's wondered why we weren't going on a field trip about Weather - I made the point that none of them had gone on this field trip before and that not all the field trips would be about one particular grade - there will be future field trips that revolve around the grade 4 curriculum, just not all of them!)

The grade 4's are working on their Weather unit. Some of their assignments:
1. Last week, I assigned a weather book - the need to describe the morning and afternoon weather using words (particularly mentioning whether we have any precipitation or not), take the temperature once and record it on the thermometer (ball park it) and draw  a picture of the weather. This should hopefully be finished up in 2 weeks.

2. I've also asked them to complete a thermometer worksheet page - they need to find the temperature of 3 different locations in the world and record it on the thermometer. 

3. Get a pop bottle (or water bottle) of decent size and cut the top part off (leave about 3/4 of the bottle). Flip the top part over (make sure you take the cover off first). Tape the edges if you can. Here's a picture:

I asked them to have this ready for next Thursday. We read a page about measuring precipitation and had a really great discussion about the purpose of tracking rainfall. We talked about floods vs. droughts, river levels and what it meant of the wildlife that life in it and how that effects even more animals. Specifically, the idea of salmon in BC and how that caused the fluctuation of the eagle population. (I told them to ask their families to bring them to Boundary Bay if they could - read on the news that there's quite a number of eagles over there right now). If it weren't for reports and this dreary rain, I'd go myself!

Socials - The grade 3's are working on Canada - we finished identifying all capital cities (there will be a quiz on Thursday) and worked on identifying major rivers in Canada. 

The grade 4's, as I mentioned earlier, are working on First Nations. They have some homework - complete the page on the different types of tribes in Canada (and the regions they live in)  and finish the corresponding map that goes with it. A few of them chose to go to homework club yesterday (and are asking to go again on Monday) to complete it. Please ask them what they decided to do! This is due on Tuesday.

This has been a very wordy post, so I'm going to stop here. Have a lovely weekend!

Scholastic

Hi All,

Another post will hopefully happen this weekend to give you some updates from this week.

Before I forget:
December's Scholastic will go home next week. I know I'm sending them one after another this month, but in order to ensure that orders arrive before holidays, I will be trying to put Dec's order in on November 30th. If any of you want to use the orders as gifts, please send the order in a sealed envelope with a note to me. Let me know how you want to pick them up (I can leave a package in the office or pass it to you if you do pick up/drop off. 

Have a nice weekend!

Finally.. pictures!

Am uploading pictures (finally! Only found my camera's charger on the weekend!) from September and October into our class' photo album. Click on the two owls found to your right to view! 

Enjoy!