Long Time No Blog

I apologize for the lengthy absence blog followers!

Here is a short video of students being very quiet and focused during a math gallery walk. The purpose was to look at everyone's solutions for a math problem and to try and understand the different ways that others did the work. Afterwards, we rated the solutions for efficiency.

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The Haunted House was a grand success. I was so happy to see the students collaborating with room 209 and to fully share the experience. We all worked together and did a great job at focusing. 

We have also welcomed Emma Brooks for the University of Ottawa who will be our student teacher for most of November. She has already proven to be a confident and comfortable addition to our team. 

We continue our look at Forces Acting on Structures and Flight in Science. The grade 5s spent some time with Shauna looking at some different types of forces and how they effect certain structures. The grade 6s stayed with me and took a look at some of the properties of air. 

We are also continuing our look at Social Studies of Early Civilizations and First Nation Peoples and European Explorers. Emma will be combining this unit with some drama in the upcoming days.

In math, we recently took a look at mean, median, and mode. We have completed a Reflective Math Journal entry and will be using our Halloween Candy Data assignment to have some more practice.

Next up, we will be doing a unit on Patterning.

We recently Skyped with Ms. Rodriguez's class in the States to discuss our Global Read Aloud. I was away but I heard the students did a fantastic job. The story was being covered by a local newspaper on their end!

In Language, we are going to continue ECLIPSE but we are going to start getting more structured with our writing. So far, students have been allowed to have free choice during writing. I am now going to be giving them more structure with a writing purpose to focus on. Their writing has been very creative and descriptive. We will now focus on capitals, punctuation, editing, and planning our writing more completely before beginning a first draft.

I hope you are enjoying the Home Missions calendar that was sent home last week. I would love feedback as to how they are going. As always, please let me know if you would like to come in and volunteer or if you have any questions or comments.

Tiiu

Updates

We have decided to invite Shauna's class to help us put together this year's Haunted House. Now we just have to plan a theme and get started.

In ECLIPSE, we've added a third activity. This one is called Reading to Someone. Here we are sitting EEKK (elbow elbow knee knee) and checking with each other for understanding.

We have also already connected with one class for our Comparing and Contrasting Communities project with Instagram. Our first month's theme was "School Meals". We met with a class from Iowa using Skype. We found out they all eat in the cafeteria. They have one student who has a peanut allergy in their whole school! They have cards they scan to pay for their school meals. They also have a law that limits the kind of food they can serve but it also effects the kind of snacks they share on their birthdays. We picked next month's theme together which is going to be "Physical Activity in School". 

 Here we are doing a Mystery Skype. This class is from Hull and we are going to do some activities with them throughout the year and then try and meet with each other live and in person!

 We are doing our second entry in our Reflective Math Journals. This one is on Place Value.

 We have started our Global Read Aloud. You can read more about it here. Most of us are really enjoying this book about a girl named Melody who has a lot of obstacles and gifts in her life. We are looking forward to connecting with some global classroom partners to discuss the book.

Indoor recess antics.

This Thursday we are going to the Parliament Hills to participate in the Rolling Rampage. 

Look at the amazing gift that Katie shared with Tiiu! She cried. For reals.

Run Fox Run

All students from grades 1-6 ran their little hearts out at the Terry Fox Run at Dovercourt today. It was a lovely sunny day and perfect to be outside together. The grade 6 students will miss going to Dovercourt to do the Terry Fox Run next year.

We have been doing ECLIPSE almost every day. Today was a great day in ECLIPSE. One friend was having trouble because she didn't feel like reading. Some of us helped her with great advice. Here it is:

What To Do If You Don't Feel Like Reading:

1. Find the most interesting book that you have in your Book Box
2. If you don't feel like reading a lot of words, pick a book where you can read the pictures
3. If you don't feel like reading, pick a book that you have already read and re-read it
4. Try to have a book in your Book Box that you will always feel like reading

The advice was great and it really helped the student out. She ended up reading a picture book that we had already read in class and also looked at a book about animals that had a lot of pictures with good captions.

In ECLIPSE, we also reviewed Text Busting. In Text Busting you figure out the following about the text you are reading:

1. Genre
2. Purpose
3. Target Audience
4. Message/Big Idea/Moral/Main Idea
5. Evidence: 3 pieces of evidence to support the main idea
6. Summary: Somebody Wanted But So Then

Hop on Edmodo tonight and keep us in the loop about that thing that we talked about. You know what I mean.

TGIF WCWFM (We Can't Wait For Monday)

These are some pictures from Week 2 at school (Sohail).

We enjoy doing things together with Room 209.

This is a list of behaviours that will help us succeed in math.

 These posters are part of ECLIPSE which stands for Engaged, Choice, Literacy, Independence, Purpose, Stamina, and Enthusiasm.

 This is Ukulele Club. We are looking forward to learning more and getting out to perform more this year. Please check out the link for Chukuleles for more information.

We had a Mystery Skype planned this week but had to cancel due to technical difficulties. We are excited to try our first one. In it, we Skype another class somewhere in the world and ask yes or no questions to try and guess where each other lives.

We love Genius Hour (Noah). Genius Hour is a time for people who have been standing in a little cave (as in their group of friends), to get out and meet other people (Quinn). It gives you a chance to think freely, and get outside of the box (Ben). Genius Hour is when we get to pick a purpose and create a project to fulfill it and have fun (Aidan). It's sort of like productive free time (Kaitlyn). The point is to spend time doing something that we are interested in and being productive (William). There are a lot of great ideas coming out such as a collage celebrating Churchill, a webcam to capture the Degus at night, a skit about a witch, several charity projects, some movie ideas, and a campaign about online bullying to name a few (Sharky).

Second Week

Hello!

We want to tell you about what we have been up to so far.

We have been doing something called ECLIPSE (Rowan). It is a Language Arts program (Katie). ECLIPSE stands for Engaged Choice Literacy Independence Purpose Stamina Enthusiasm (Kaitlyn). We have been practicing "Read to Self" everyday and building our stamina and muscle memory (Sohail). It is very very quiet when we are all doing "Read to Self" (Sarah). It's also very peaceful (Noah). We have Book Boxes that have good fit books in them and we practice picking a good seat, and reading independently (Katie). We talked about the three ways you can read a book (Read the Pictures, Read the Words, Retell the Story) (Evan and Jay). We also usually have volunteers demonstrate how to do it correctly and how not to do it (Evan).
I hope the students are enjoying ECLIPSE and learning from it so far. We will be training and adding on to the choices over the next little while (Tiiu).

We've been practicing our times tables by doing something called Precision Math each day (Jay). Precision Math is where you have a minute to answer as many math facts as you can and you are trying to reach your goal (Grady). We set our goals by writing the numbers 0-9 over and over again for a minute. We used the number of digits that we wrote down in one minute to set our goal (Zane). When we pass our goal we get to move on to the next fact family (Yarabi). Each digit counts as a point (Quinn). The idea is that students are working according to their own skills and pace. At the end of each minute, we graph our results (Katie). The Precision Math program has us practicing our facts from the 2 times tables to the 12 times tables. After we finish all of the facts, we might restart with a higher goal or we might move on to the Division program (Dominic).

In math, we also filled out a multiplication table with all of the facts that we knew automatically with a green pencil (Sohail). We did all of the facts that we needed to calculate a bit in yellow (Rebecca P.). We used red if the answer takes us a long time to figure out (Aidan). Now the students will have a better idea of the facts that they need to work to memorize or make little tricks to help them learn them. We will be learning some of these tricks in class.

We've also been working on an art project based on the artist Chuck Close (Grace). We are using photos of our faces to recreate something that looks like a Chuck Close piece of art (Ben). Chuck Close did grid paintings because he had a special kind of dyslexia known as prosopagnosia which made it difficult for him to recognize faces (Leigha). His style of art is called photorealism (Sarah). Chuck Close got a blood clot near the top of his spine that paralyzed him but he persevered through it and still makes art (Ciarn). After his accident, when he started painting again, his painting were more colourful. He said he was happier after the accident (Dominic). He was happy to be alive and still be able to paint (Alicia).

We are very happy to be in Room 207 (Katie).
We want to know if you are visiting us here. Please comment so that we know you are around. Thanks!