September 22nd, 2016

Today was Day 4. Usually on Day 4 we will be having a small Math quiz. These quizzes are summative not formative. That means that I don't use them to determine a student's "final" grade. I use these as a way for me to see how students are doing and to determine who needs extra support, practice, etc. They are short, usually only 1-2 questions. The questions are taken directly from the practice questions we have already been working on in class. However, as we are only beginning our Math unit, today we had a multiplication review quiz instead. We used Kahoot again today, to further review and solidify our understanding of the 0x and 1x tables. Tomorrow we will be finished with our review of the 2x and 4x tables, so stay tuned! We will be working on the 8x and 9x tables next, and they are a little more tricky! Practice at home if you can. Practice counting up by a number while riding in the car, use your Mathletics account, get a family member to quiz you, etc. But PRACTICE! We definitely want to master our facts.

In Language Arts today, we continued to work in our Paragraphing books. Today we practiced using our brainstorming to help us create body sentences. A good strategy to help you create a concise paragraph, is to group your ideas. I used a highlighter to organize my thoughts. Ideas that don't fit together, probably won't fit into your final paragraph - and that's okay! 

Grouping your ideas together will make it easier to form your sentences. When writing your sentences, remember that a good sentence begins with a capital and ends with end punctuation (periods, question marks, exclamation marks). In paragraphs, you also want to vary the lengths of your sentences. Have some short and some long sentences. Try using different forms of end punctuation to keep your writing interesting. Remember, not all the ideas from our brainstorming will fit! Editing out ideas is important. It will keep your paragraph focused and concise. 

Next, we will be learning about writing topic and concluding sentences for our paragraphs. 

Today we had Buddies for the very first time. We are going to be buddies with Mrs. Luco's ECDP class. This is a wonderful opportunity for students in our class to get to be good leaders and role models. It is also fun to take a break and to get to play for a little while! This year we will be helping our buddies with different activities, reading them stories, and helping them learn different routines. Today we helped them get ready to go home at the end of their day. Everyone did a wonderful job! 

In Science/Social today we did some work with our Chromebooks. Today we began organizing our Google Drives. We learned how to create file folders to keep them organized. I also shared a document with students so that we could practice saving and moving documents into our drives. Today we moved "Best Weather in Canada" to the Science folder. We also discussed how to share documents and what to consider when sharing documents. How many people will be editing it? Too many can be difficult to manage. We all tried to edit a document at the same time. It was tough! Do you want people to edit it? For example, I didn't want the assignment "Best Weather" to be edited. So, I needed to change the sharing settings for this document to "View Only" so that no one could change it. We will be learning more and more about our Google accounts in the upcoming weeks. Today we also continued to work on the "Best Weather in Canada" assignment. This is a great cross-curricular activity. Students are researching the weather across Canada, which relates to our current units in Science (Weather Watch) and Social Studies (Canadian Geography). Students are going to be using their data to create a double bar graph comparing two capital cities, bring in skills we are acquiring in our current Math unit (Statistics and Probability). I can't wait to keep working on this assignment. Stay tuned for our final results. 

Agenda
Language Arts:
- Read 20 minutes
- Book Orders (due September 29th)

Math: 
- pg. 268 #1 (NOT FOR HOMEWORK)

Health:
- PEAK Basketball (tomorrow - class only)
- Terry Fox Donations/Permission Forms (due Monday - Safiya, Danica, Dhilini, Vaso, Kadin, Rukaya, Manish, Teona)

Spirit Week: Friday - PJ Day ($2 or Cheese Strings)

Terry Fox Walk - September 29th

Picture Day - October 3rd