We have made it to the end of our first week back at school!  It was wonderful to see the class again and Ms. Miller and I were very please at the work students completed this week – they jumped right back in!

Here’s a snapshot of what we worked on this week:

Math:  We are continuing to work on multiplication and are turning our focus to multiplying larger digits.  This week we worked on multiplying digits by 10, 100 and 1000.  Next week we will focus on various strategies to multiply double digits.

Writing:  Before Christmas we were concentrating on writing personal narrative stories.  We will now turn our attention to a non-fiction writing style called persuasive writing.  Students this week were introduced to the style, showed the skeleton (what, why, why, why, what was that again) and learned about the type of vocabulary that we use in persuasive writing.  Next week students will write their first piece on their favourite season.

Health/Bible:  In addition to our citizenship focus, students are looking at BC’s core competencies (thinking, communication, and personal/social) and using them to create goals for this part of the school year.

Science:  We reviewed the concepts of force, friction, gravity, potential & kinetic energy and have started learning about the six different simple machines.

Social Studies: Who knew that Canada had such a range of incredible heroes? Right before the break the class presented their heroes representing the major physical regions of Canada. WOW! They were so much fun, and it was great to see all the learning that took place the past month and a half. This week we did some group-assessment, self-assessment and reflection on this project.

Reading: We are nearing the end of our time with Wonder. Everyone is finalizing the last parts of their folders, which are due next Thursday. This week we drew our own self-portraits in the style of the book cover, wrote precepts to live our lives by, and came up with possible alternate titles for the book. Busy, busy, busy! We finished up by having a class discussion about what it means to ‘choose kind’, the theme of the book, and ways that we can be kind to one another and the power that our words have.

A few more items…

Citizenship Focus:  Over the next week we will be focusing on classroom citizenship.  We will explore themes such as building a wall of trust and what it means to be a good classmate, empathy and being careful with our words, including others and teamwork.  Yesterday morning we looked at what it means to be a good classmate.  We built a ‘wall of trust’ with Kleenex boxes and then watched how negative comments and actions can break down the wall and create a classroom that feels unsafe for students.  We looked at what the Bible says about treating others and explored ways we could keep our classroom safe.

Gym Strip:  Student have PE on Mondays and Fridays. We have a class goal of ALL students having their gym strip at school on Monday.

Health Checks:   Please ensure that a health check is done before your child comes to school each day.  Thank you for your diligence in this matter.

Early Morning Drop Off:  I wanted to send a reminder that students should be dropped off between 8:45 and 9:00 each morning.  If at all possible, we ask that students not be dropped off earlier than 8:45.

January Dates:

Jan. 15 – Knights Day

Jan. 20 – Jersey Day

Jan. 22 – Knights Day & Early Dismissal for K-12

Jan. 29 – Term 1 Report Cards go home & Knight’s Day

Enjoy these pictures from our Christmas class party!