Happy New Year!

Welcome back everyone! So glad to see the students' smiley faces this morning. We wasted no time and got off and running today.

We have volunteered our services for starting a new routine at Churchill. Our class, along with Roy's class, are taking charge of the morning singing of "O Canada". Two of our students and two of Roy's students go down each morning and sing the anthem and make other announcements. Each student will do it at least once this month. I will have them write their assigned date into their agendas tomorrow. These announcements are made at 8:10 every morning. Students who are not present for this routine will be marked as late or absent. Please make every effort to get to school on time.

Another new routine is the switch in our nutrition breaks. Students will now be eating before they go outside. Some students mentioned that they did not like the change today. We discussed giving this new routine at least a week. I also mentioned that students are always allowed to snack on fruits and vegetables at any time, as long as it is not interrupting their learning. We also talked about how they may have to re-think what they pack for their nutrition breaks if they are feeling hungry at different times. I encourage you to discuss this as a family.

Today we did some review of multiplication and division. We will also be looking at the metric system this week. Coming up soon will be a unit on fractions.

Next week, I will assign a math problem for homework. This problem will be one very similar to one that the students have completed in class.

In Literacy we discussed how to punctuate quotations (not an easy thing to do incidentally). The students looked at examples in groups and tried to write their own rules.

Coming up in Literacy will be a closer look at non-fiction articles.

We have had another change to our schedule and are lucky to have Cheryl Ashfield joining us for 30 minutes during Literacy. Cheryl will be spending this time doing guided reading groups with some of the students. Kelly Poulin also continues to support us and will be completing some reading assessments with the students and she will then also be doing some guided reading groups.

In science, we will be beginning a unit on "Forces Acting on Structures" for the grade fives and "Flight" for the grade sixes.

Here are a few more reminders:

We are skating this Friday and we welcome any help and company.

There is a PD Day next Friday.

The whole school will be participating in "Electives" during the month of January. Students will be given the choice of different workshops to join. Look for more information to come soon.