World Down Syndrome Awareness Day

In honour of Down Syndrome awareness day, we had many students participate in wearing crazy socks! We had wild, crazy, funky and mis-matched socks!

Journal entries this week were "free write". The students had a lot to write about after the weekend and many were able to fill up 2 pages!

This week in our fairy tale unit, the students had to come up with a hero/heroine and make him/her interesting (magical element and the helpers). They also had to create a villain (someone or some creature who will create a problem for the hero/heroine in their story). Their characters had to fit with the settings they created last week. We have some very creative writers, who have created wonderful fairy tale characters!

We also worked with a new set of spelling words this week. A "word sort" sheet will come home on the Monday of each week. Please make sure your child cuts and sorts the words and is able to explain to you why they go where they have sorted them. Also, it is important that your child know the meaning of these words. Homophones can be confusing but understanding which word to use and its correct spelling, is important.

A new activity was introduced to the students, called "Draw and Label". The students pulled a word from the word sort bags and had to sketch a drawing showing us the meaning of the word. 

In Math this week, the students were challenged with some mental math strategies to solve difficult subtraction questions without regrouping. They were shown how to make multiples of 10 and then subtract mentally by counting up. They had a lot of practice with this and took a quiz on Thursday.

This week in Science we started our new Building unit. This unit follows the Survivor theme and has the students in "tribes" to complete challenges. To kick off the unit the students chose a buff colour and had their pictures taken. They then created a tribe name. Our first challenge was to learn about fair tests. The students were given a task of copying a list of items from the board. Some students had broken pencils and some were sitting further away from the board and at a bad angle. 

The students were excited to open their TREE MAIL.

For this challenge the students were given cardstock, plasticine, a paper plate and unifix cubes to test whether a square support or arch support could hold the most mass. Their conclusion was that the arch support is stronger because the weight is more evenly distributed.

We started reading a new novel after recess while the students are having their morning snack. It ties in nicely with our new science Survivor theme!

For Art, we finished our water colour bridges. They turned out GREAT!

Congratulations to our super readers this week!

Some of our students were spotted at the family dance! What a fun night!