We had a great day today. The students were given a whole bunch of different Christmas-themed work choices, and spent most of the day working on them at their own pace. It was a classic Montessori day.
We met with our buddies, and used a digital classroom created by Ms. Adamson to learn about how Christmas is celebrated in different parts of the world, as well as some other holidays that are important in different cultures.
We continued watching A Muppet Christmas Carol, and got to the part where Scrooge meets the ghost of Christmas past. We'll be finishing the movie up tomorrow - no spoilers!
Tomorrow is also our long-awaited Sock Exchange. The students have worked hard on their cards and I think there will be a lot of happy faces in Room 6. Please make sure to send your socks if you haven't already done so.
Speaking of happy faces, tomorrow is also our last spelling quiz of 2023.
We had a great day today. We didn't get to as much of the work as I was hoping, but it was for a good reason - the students were putting so much effort into their Secret Santa cards. The messages they wrote, and the care they put into choosing what to draw, and even what colours to use, was really heartwarming.
We also did some whole-school carolling, and had Music.
We started watching A Muppet Christmas Carol, which has become something of a Christmas tradition. We'll be watching it tomorrow as well, and wrapping up on Friday, so its only about ~25-30 minutes each day. This approach lets us have lots of class discussions, and ensures the students are comprehending what they're watching - it'd be a shame to rush a story this good.
This year, we're connecting A Christmas Carol to our exploration of journaling techniques, and the students are doing some "Event map Journaling" to capture the main events and characters.
Here are a few pictures of what we've been working on:
Please send your socks to school for our Sock Exchange on Friday!
It was a busy and tiring day today. We spent a lot of time working on a Christmas Craft - which many students completed and brought home in paper bags.
We review our graphing work from yesterday, and gave feedback to the different groups.
We did Daily LA as well.
The students had time to finish their paragraphs from yesterday.
The sock exchange is on Friday - please send in your socks as soon as you can! We'll be making the cards in class tomorrow.
We had a pretty good day today. You can definitely tell the class is ready for a break though. Thankfully we were still able to do some excellent writing this morning, as the students wrote paragraphs about their Mars Rovers to wrap the project up for good.
We also did a graphing activity, which was really more of a "Teamwork" activity, as the students worked in groups to create graphs to showcase data that was given to them.
We had Music in the afternoon, and practiced the new spelling words in festive fonts.
Remember that this week is full of spirit days! Here's the breakdown:
We had a pretty good day today. I was a little disappointed because our plan to make explanatory Rover videos on the Ipads was kind of ruined by tech issues. The students still had fun filming themselves talking about their work, and we'll do a bit of rover writing next week too to fully wrap it up.
We went outside and played kickball in the fog.
We also performed songs from the winter concert, and watched other classes perform theirs.
We ended our day with the spelling quiz (which I haven't had a chance to mark yet), and a French lesson where we learned the French phrases for 'Good morning', 'Good evening', 'Goodnight', and "That's life."
Also - The official "Sock Exchange" will take place next Friday, on December 22. If your child is absent that day, no problem - they will receive their socks in the new year. Also, please wrap the socks or put them in a little gift bag. :)
Stay tuned for next week's festive spelling words (probably will not be posted until Sunday), and have a nice weekend!
We drew names for the Secret Santa Sock Exchange - please check to make sure your child knows who they are giving to. We'll be making the cards in class next week, so don't worry about those.
I hope to see you tonight at the Winter Concert, and remember that tomorrow is PJ Day, and is also our spelling quiz.
We had a great day today but I don't have much to write because we spent so much of it building rovers. They're just about done!
Another big chunk of our day was spent finishing up the good copies of our 'planet paragraph' writing task, which is also wrapping up. It's been such a busy week.
Tomorrow, the students will be creating short videos to explain the features of their rovers, and how these features will help on a mission to Mars.
We'll also take more artistic pictures of the completed rovers.
I'm looking forward to the "Winter Solstice" Event tomorrow!
Take a look at this horrendous mess the students left today.
Just kidding! What may appear to be the results of the most destructive, lawless day ever, is in fact just a Rover construction zone. And if you look closely, you'll see they're turning out pretty well!
We'll keep working away at them tomorrow. It's not too late to send supplies!
We spent a lot of time working on our planet paragraph good copies today too. In math, the students made their own pie charts after doing quick surveys of the class.
Thanks to everyone who already returned their Sock Exchange forms! If your child is interested in participating (which is optional), please return those forms by Thursday. Then I can assign all the students a person to give for, and they'll have the weekend to pick out a pair of socks. :)
We had a pretty good day today. The students worked hard on converting their paragraph plans into rough copies. Tomorrow, they'll be working on the final drafts. It feels like we've been working on this project forever!! But its easy to see the growth the students have made over the past few weeks. It'll be fun to compare their new paragraphs to the ones they wrote about earth many moons ago.
In math, we looked at a new type of graph - the pie chart. Students who were more familiar with fractions seemed to grasp the value of a pie chart right away. Students who were more familiar with pie were disappointed.
In the afternoon, we had Spelling Practice and Daily LA. We talked about the 'aw' sound, which occasionally is just made by a single letter 'a', like in 'water', and 'father'.
We ended our day by reading A Rover's Story. Please send in recyclable building materials if you haven't already done so!
I sent home forms about the Secret Santa Sock Exchange! If your child is interested in participating, please sign and send the form back by Thursday, December 14. Kids who don't participate in the Sock Exchange will still get to make and receive Christmas Cards with their classmates.
The focus this week is on -a words where the 'a' sounds like "aw". I couldn't find very many of these, so the bottom row of each list is dedicated to sight words.
"Walk", "Water" and "Talk" are some of the most commonly misspelled words in writing - maybe this week we'll change that trend!
The students continued to work on their paragraph planning, and most students were able to finish their plans completely. Concluding sentences were challenging but we got there.
We met up with our buddy class, and did some Buddy Reading in the library. The students read Christmas, Kwanzaa, and Hanukkah books from or shelf displays, as well as books from the shelves that they picked out themselves.
Today's spelling quiz was fantastic. I could not believe how many students were able to spell necessary, determine, and government. Usually Sight Word lists are the hardest, but this week, the students did better than ever. Thanks for all your support with studying at home!
We had our first French lesson today. We learned about France from a book on Epic, and then we learned to say bonjour and au revoir.
We ended our day with a practice Lockdown drill, a bit of Rover's Story, Music, and some Daily LA.
There is no school tomorrow! Stayed tuned for next week's spelling words, and have a nice weekend!
Zac
Also... This is a message about our upcoming Food Drive. :)
Hello families,
In the spirit of building community and gratitude we are hosting a food drive at LBS. If you are able, please send in any non-perishable food items for donation to the Calgary Food Bank. We invite families to bring their donations to the Winter Solstice event next Thursday evening. LBS will be collecting donations until Friday December 15.
We had a pretty good day today. A huge chunk of our day was spent re-doing the paragraph planning sheets. This time, the students spent a solid 30 minutes just working on their topic sentences, and sub-topic sentences. We broke the rest of the planning up into 15-minute chunks per sentence, so students had ample time to really consider whether their writing made sense and flowed in a logical way. It's definitely looking better now. Tomorrow's work will be revising to add transition words, remove repetitive language, and upgrade adjectives.
In math, we looked at bar graphs, and talked about situations where a bar graph would be more useful than a line graph, and vise versa.
We did Daily LA, read a Rover's Tale, and learned about levers, pulleys, and other simple machines, from this excellent episode of Science Max! If your child isn't sick of it yet, I recommend giving it another watch at home - it's awesome!
On that note: we're going to start building our Mars Rover models next week. Please send in any cardboard, tape, containers, etc. (anything from the recycling bin really) that could help your child, and potentially their classmates, in constructing a Mars Rover model. The students will also be able to use K-NEX or Lego, but they'll have to be careful about making sure it doesn't get mixed in with the other supplies.
Today was a lot like yesterday. I'm having to be more strict than I'd like to be because of all the calling out and general 'laziness' we've all observed lately (things like leaving messes in the hallway, backpacks left wide open, books shoved into baskets haphazardly, etc.) We had a few serious talks which I hope will set the class back on the right track. All that being said, there were also some wonderful shining moments from the day that really stood out.
The best part of the day was the presentation about The Mustard Seed and homelessness in Calgary. Th students listened extremely attentively, asked thoughtful questions, and showed empathy on a level that was nothing short of heartwarming. It was awesome. They also did an excellent job with their follow-up journal task.
The struggle really began when we tried to do paragraph planning, using the classic 'paragraph burger' template. For some reason it was extremely difficult for the kids to group similar information together and turn the jot notes they were provided with into sentences. I'm confused because this is basically the same thing we already did when we were writing about tanks, and horses, and earth, so it should be pretty familiar by now...
We ended our day by learning about another simple machine - rollers - and how they are different from wheels. We talked about whether wheels or rollers would be more useful when constructing a Mars Rover.
We also talked about different levels of 'questioning' - using fun nature vocabulary. Puddle questions are questions that you can easily answer, without any real depth. Lake questions have some depth, but with some research and brainstorming, you can probably reach an answer. Ocean questions are incredibly deep - the types of questions that philosophy professors with elbow-patch blazers argue about for centuries, and sometimes never manage to answer. The students came up with their own questions about space, for each of the three levels. This was another shining moment in our day.
Have a nice night,
Zac
PS: We are planning to do a Room 6 "Secret Santa Sock Exchange" soon! More details to come.
We had a bit of an unruly day today. The students needed a lot of reminders about working quietly, and not calling out during class discussions at the carpet. We have also been having a lot of things go missing - small toys, special pencils and erasers mostly - and I have asked the kids to leave all that stuff at home just to be safe.
In the morning, we worked on the preliminary steps of our final paragraph task. The students will be writing 1-2 paragraphs about a planet other than Earth. They will be incorporating all the techniques we've focused on over the last few weeks - sentence variety, topic and concluding sentences, engaging vocabulary words, writing flow, and editing. But before we get to any of that, we're scanning through pre-written jot notes on the planets, and planning what information to include. Tomorrow, we'll complete a 'paragraph planning burger' organizer, and on Wednesday and Thursday, the students will write their final copies.
We learned about a journaling technique called "CSI Journaling". CSI stands for "Colour, Symbol, Image". When listening to a presentation, or watching a video, students will jot down a colour that connects to the content, a symbol to represent a big idea, and sketch an image too. We'll be using this journaling technique tomorrow when we listen to our Guest Speaker talk about homelessness in Calgary.
In the afternoon, we practiced spelling words, and then did a graph analysis activity in math. Students looked at a line graph, and made observations and predictions based on the information it showed. Feel free to look at this graaaph at home and discuss it further.
Building Materials Wanted!
At the end of the day today, the students started to plan their own 'Mars Rover' models, that they will be building out of misc. loose parts (mostly stuff from a recycling bin). If you have clean boxes, containers, skewers, popsicle sticks, tape, etc. that might be good for a project like this, please send them to school with your child! I'd like to start building the rovers next week if possible.
Please also talk with your child about their own plan, and help them make sure its feasible. :)
This week is all about sight words. The words on List A are essential for writing - even students who usually do list B or C should review them, just to make sure they've got them down.
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