Monday, January 26

 Hi parents,

We had a pretty good day today.

In the morning, the students started a mini-project for Social Studies, in which they're creating posters to show their understanding of Alberta's natural resources.  It might be helpful to talk to your child at home about the big ones - agriculture, fossil fuels, and forestry - and brainstorm all the ways these resources are used, and also how they connect to people's jobs in the province. 

We went over the new spelling words and had a good discussion about the 'ce' blend.

In the afternoon, we did Daily LA, and then learned about how we can describe shapes 'mathematically'. We talked about how to mathematicians, the 'attributes' of a shape (angles, sides, type of polygon, parallel lines, etc.) are generally the best way to describe them. We talked about avoiding words like 'big' or 'pointy', and using the proper terms, like 'obtuse' or 'acute'. 

Report Cards are coming up soon - and unfortunately a lot of students seem to be getting a little lazy with their work once again. The work above is a great example of what can be accomplished in just 20 minutes of hard work. Unfortunately about half the students in the class have still only traced their polygons - after about 30 minutes of work time. I know the class is capable of much more than this. But since we are a Montessori classroom, its really important for that motivation and focus to come intrinsically - not from fear of being punished, or having constant one-on-one teacher support, but from a genuine desire to complete work that you're proud of.

We had a big talk about this at the end of the day, and we've had many similar talks throughout the year, but effort continues to be our biggest struggle overall.

We are going to have our geometry quiz on Wednesday, Jan. 28.

This quiz will cover slightly different things for Grade 3 and 4, but here are the terms everyone should know. If you know all these you will crush this quiz.

-regular / irregular polygons

-right, acute, and obtuse angles (measuring angles with protractor for Grade 4 only)

-equilateral, isosceles, and scalene / right triangles

-what a quadrilateral is, and a couple examples of quadrilaterals (rhombus, parallelogram, rectangle, square, pentagon, trapezoid)

-regular polygons (equilateral triangle, square, pentagon, hexagon, octagon) 

-parallel lines

-sides / vertices

I know it seems like a lot, but we have covered all these terms in class repeatedly, and the kids actually do know them pretty well already. The bold concepts are most important.

Have a nice night!

Zac