By Sohail, Kaitlyn, and William (sort of)

Social studies
We are studying first nations and European explorers for the grade sixes and ancient civilizations for the grade fives. We are making posters with all our information on them. 

Language 
We are making a personal narrative called our "important things". It is a piece of writing about something really important in our lives. 

Skating
We went skating with Gillian's class on Friday. It had a really fun time skating with the grade 1 and 2's. We helped them skate.

Monday-School of Rock 
School of Rock (the 9th) is performing on the big stage at Algonquin. We are doing 12 songs (2 Christmas songs). Rogers TV will be filming us on local television. After our Remembrance Day ceremony we only had 2 weeks to practice!     

Art Electives
Today we are having art electives. The electives include; baking, dance, tall art (with Tiiu), sock puppets, never ending art, wearable art, African art, mosaics. 

Mystery Skype
We will be having a mystery Skype next week.

Stories

On Remembrance Day we met the Mayor! He let some of the students wear his $100 000 + gold chain! He had an assistant that held an umbrella for him. Swag.

Owen is teaching us about the different types of graphs and how each of them is useful for different things. We are going to make some different kinds of graph from our Halloween Candy Data.

Emma has us reading stories from the different Social Studies cultures that we are studying. We are "Busting" these texts and are going to use them to prepare for a drama improvisation game.

Quinn is modelling the posters we are each making for Social Studies. They are turning out fabulously!

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

Volunteer

Since my email is misbehaving, I am trying to reach out to you here:

I am really in need of some volunteers. I am hopeful that someone might be able to come and help us with some props. I will have students there to help you. Please let me know if you can help.

If you would like to drop in on Thursday to see the Haunted House, please feel free to come in anytime. I am sure we could use some extra hands first thing in the morning as well. We will be conducting tours throughout most of the day otherwise.

The Snowsuit drive has begun. If you have gently used snowsuits to donate, please send them to the office for now as our donation bin is not yet in the lobby.

Please also remember that there is a Halloween Math Freaks event on Wednesday evening to help promote math and community. This event was well attended last year and was a fun way to engage in some math together.

Tiiu Tsao
Churchill Alternative School
Grade 5/6
www.room310churchill.blogspot.com

One Million Hours

Hello!

The Junior teachers have been getting together to talk about math. We have decided on a common template that we'd like to use to help you all solve math problems. We are going to us NWTT or Notice Wonder Think Therefore.

To demonstrate, we made up this question:

Then we modeled how to solve the question.

In class, we tried a question. We tried "Is it possible to live to be one million hours old?"

Most of us solved it in one of three ways. Some of us used multiplication to find out how many hours are in a year. Then we kept adding this amount until we got to 1 000 000. 

Some of us used multiplication once we found out how many hours are in a year to see how many hours old an older person would be. Some of us used our grandparent's age, some of us used a fact from the Guiness Book of Records, some of us used Tiiu's age and then promptly got sent to the office. 

Another group used division. These people divided 1 000 000 by 24 to see how many days is equal to 1 000 000 hours. Then they divided that number by 365 to see how many years is equal to 1 000 000 hours.

We talked to each other and decided that the division method was probably the most efficient. We thought it was efficient because it took the fewest amount of steps to land on a more exact answer. This doesn't mean it was the best method. If division is hard for you, this method would not work for you.

IXL

I am hoping that many of you are enjoying the Home Missions. I have not heard very much feedback so, if you are doing the Missions, perhaps you could comment here and let me know how they are going?

I wanted to remind everyone that you can do IXL at home. I think it will be very helpful for all of you to continue practicing your operations and facts at home. If you are forgetting your username and password, you can send me an email and I will send it directly to you.

Are you checking in on our Global Read Aloud Zone on Edmodo? Many of Mrs. Rodriguez's class are now on and wanting to talk about Melody and the book with you.

Please remember to bring in indoor shoes and your photo orders.

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.