**Reminder** No school for students on Monday, January 30th. This week we continued with our science, measuring, and non-fiction focus. In Mathematics, we continue to practice our speed math and we’ve hit a new milestone – over 50% of us are completing the whole page of mixed equations in under three minutes and thirty seconds!! We are awesome at Math!! We also reviewed, practiced, and assessed our skills of liquid measurement with hands-on application. We used graduated cylinders to create and read a variety of measurements. A catchy song reminded us to always look at the bottom of the meniscus! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Jbkk6ndivM
During our inquiry time, we explored another form of energy, light. We used a problem-based learning approach to inquire into the different types of clothes we wear and why. We discovered that, along with helping us accentuate our culture and personality, they provide a practical function of absorbing and/or reflecting light. This is important because light will always create heat and heat is an element we, as warm-blooded beings, need in the right amount. Too little and we will freeze; too much and we’ll burn or be sick. We continued with our informational writing project and moved from our researching and drafting stage to editing, revising, and publishing. Soon, each of us will have our own informational book published and added to our class library! To assist us with our research, Ms. Sheehan joined us on Tuesday to talk about evaluating websites for accuracy and reliability. We learned that we need to look for extra sources, recent updates, and verifiable authors. She got our attention with this amazing BBC April Fool’s joke: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9dfWzp7rYR4
We visited our Grade 1 Reading Buddies on Thursday and introduced them to the Travelling Tales project. They will complete a project during the next cycle in February. We watched our video, discussed the 5 part story mountain, and then worked on our own ‘Travelling Tale’ in class by trading writing parts with others and building off of stories that other students had created. Finally, on Friday, we had the most fun during our Carnival parade! Thanks to all the parents for helping us with our amazing costumes and for joining us! Coming up next week:
**If you made it this far, congrats! You win a prize! Say code word 'Yoda' to Ms. D for your prize.....shhhh, don't tell others Happy Friday!!!!! Some updates for this week:
- Students should come dressed in their costumes on Friday. 3D's theme is occupations. - Our parade will begin at 9am, we will finish around 9:30am, and we will return to the classroom to enjoy paczki. - We will have swimming on Friday! Students should come ready with swim kit.
We continued to learn more about each other as we shared our holidays.
What is sound? What's the difference between volume and pitch? How does the vibration change for high and low pitch? We had several hands-on experiments to explore these questions.
We continued with measurement of liquid. Students worked on reading measurements accurately while making their own beaker from a cup. Happy Birthday Marci!!  Happy Friday!!!  Greetings all,
More information on Carnival can be found here on the library website: http://aswarsaw.libguides.com/carnival Also, please note the following event from our tech coaches: 21st Century Learning Wednesday, January 25 from 8:45 to 9:45 MPR We hear about 21st Century Learning and the skills our children need as learners, both now and in the future. What does 21st Century Learning look like and how do we use technology at ASW elementary school to ensure our students are developing the life, learning, and literacy skills necessary to be successful in this connected and information-rich era. In this session, we will discuss 21st Century Learning and share the process of thought and collaboration that teachers go through to ensure technology is being used effectively. We will then have hands-on time to experiment with some of the tools our students are using in the classroom. 1. Change shoes - to keep our classrooms clean and dry, it is the habit in winter for students to have outdoor shoes for play time and indoor shoes for class time. It's these small things that create a comfortable learning environment and we thank you for your help! 2. Book Swap - next week (Monday, 16th to Friday, 20th) the 5th grade students will be organizing a book swap to be taking place on Wednesday, January 25th. Students are encouraged to bring in gently used books and games. Books can be in any language. For each book or game, students will receive a ticket to use during the exchange day for a 'new' book or game of their choice. 3. Carnivale - the celebration parade and party will take place on Friday, January 27th. Our class has voted to dress up as a job or career of their choice. Our room parents, Tami and Li, are working together with Ms. Sylwia to ensure that we have a special class treat for the occasion! 4. Weekly Homework - we will be continuing with our Reading Response task, which will be due every Monday morning. Please see the attached document for more details. Geetings and welcome back to everyone! We hope that you had a safe, restful, and joyous holiday break.
Travelling Tales Follow Up: Before the holiday break we participated in a wonderful program called Travelling Tales which connected us to other students around the world. Please take a look at our final product via the link below. We were Travelling Tale 6: http://bevansjoel.wixsite.com/travellingtales/travelling-tales-media  We kicked off our week by sharing our holiday experiences. We traveled to all parts of the world and had some amazing experiences. With us all back together, we took the time to revisit our agreements and our expectations of ourselves and each other.
Ms. Hamlin visited us on Wednesday to continue our mindfulness discussion and helped us to learn more about each other with our inside-outside circle question game.
 This week in Math we continued our practice with multiplication and elapsed time, but also explored another form of measurement. We explored the many different tools we could use and the various ways to read and report the measurements.
In this unit of inquiry, we've been focusing on sound and light. This week we had several experiements to find out more about sound. We discovered that sound is vibration, it travels in waves, and we can manipulate it to change the pitch and volume.
We are inventors! On Friday, we were open-minded, creative thinkers and conducted experiements to manipulate the sounds we could make with our telephone cups.
Housekeeping: 1. Change shoes - to keep our classrooms clean and dry, it is the habit in winter for students to have outdoor shoes for play time and indoor shoes for class time. It's these small things that create a comfortable learning environment and we thank you for your help! 2. Book Swap - next week (Monday, 16th to Friday, 20th) the 5th grade students will be organizing a book swap to be taking place on Wednesday, January 25th. Students are encouraged to bring in gently used books and games. Books can be in any language. For each book or game, students will receive a ticket to use during the exchange day for a 'new' book or game of their choice. 3. Carnivale - the celebration parade and party will take place on Friday, January 27th. Our class has voted to dress up as a job or career of their choice. Our room parents, Tami and Li, are working together with Ms. Sylwia to ensure that we have a special class treat for the occasion! Happy Friday!!!  |
