Tomorrow is Hats On For Mental Health Day. Students are invited to wear a hat all day! A notice went home today about a lockdown practice scheduled for Thursday.
Today we spent finishing up activities and tying up loose ends. It is hard to believe that it is the last day of April! We made the final modifications on our cars and will test them (weather permitting) tomorrow.
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We talked a lot about fads when we were exploring options for our Entrepreneurial Adventures project. One of the fads the students were most enamored with was Sea Monkeys so today, we started growing Sea Monkeys. We will keep you posted about how this project goes. We have great expectations!
We worked on the final book club project again today. Students are creating a file folder project on the elements of their novel-character, plot, setting, theme and symbols. I am impressed with how the parts are turning out! One of the students in Room 15, Brume, is turning 10 and his family is planning on celebrating with all of the Grade 4 students at Olympic Heights! On Thursday, May 2, Brume’s family will be providing pizza and juice boxes for ALL students in Grade 4. Please feel free to send in any snack or lunch items that you wish for your child to eat in addition to the pizza and juice. We are collecting old and dry markers for recycling from home and in the school. Students are busy writing catchy jingles and making posters to remind everyone to send their markers to us! We modified our cars today to have them in peak performance shape for racing them later this week. Reminders:
Our postcards are popping up on bulletin boards in schools all across Canada! Students were thrilled to see their work in these photos today: Each day we are receiving replies to our friendly letters. We have heard back from family members, The Soccer Centre, Indigo, 7 Eleven, The Westside Centre and Odd1sOut. There is much joy and anticipation when the mail arrives! Here is an online game to practice long division. It requires Flash so will not work on Apple iPads but should work on all other devices. It is basic but reviews the steps well for those that need more practice. https://www.free-training-tutorial.com/math-games/long-division-snorks-game.html?fbclid=IwAR3VGsTP1qpMcud1yjjYRcE6OX5uxENUqjzPWQh1HPcl8pAvtLG-Eka4Yko We are finishing the division unit and moving into fractions and decimals next week. Happy Easter to all that celebrate and I hope everyone enjoys the four day weekend! The Vincent Massey band this morning was great! They played songs that were familiar to the kids and engaged them in naming the instruments and songs. We heard Harry Potter and Indiana Jones and The Final Countdown among others. It was a great inspiration for the Grade 6 classes for next year. Students used the computers this morning to start researching their mavericks. They quickly found that some mavericks have a lot of information written about them and others require a bit of deeper digging. If students are eager to, they can research at home and print information to bring to school. We will have more computer research time at school next week too! Reminders:
An amazing part of today was being invited to go and visit the polling station in the gym. Students learned about the rules of voting, political boundaries and how to cast a vote. They learned about spoiled ballots and all the different things that can still be counted as valid even though they might not be filled in correctly. Students learned how the provincial government accommodates for all the languages spoken in the province and how they ensure every Canadian has access to the information needed to cast their vote. Did you know that people working at a polling station are not allowed to wear any of the colours that represent parties? Observant students wondered why the name tags they wore were outlined in orange.
We started perusing the textbooks today for evidence of our Mavericks. Some were mentioned and some were not but much could be learned about the province when our Mavericks lived here. Tomorrow we will begin research using computers. Students should now be finished reading their Book Club books and we are ready to start the final activity of the unit. Please encourage your child to complete their book as soon as possible if they are not done. Reminders:
Today we started tennis! Students learned how to throw, bounce and catch a tennis ball over the net. The focus was on underhand throwing and controlling the bounce so that a partner could easily catch it. Students moved on to using a racquet to return a ball thrown by their partner. Our instructor is a tennis pro from First Serve Tennis and he will be with us for ten classes. Our next class is on Thursday. As we begin the story writing unit, students are learning how to "show not tell" emotions and strategies to use to ensure that their stories are not scripts of dialogue but a balance of dialogue with exposition and description. We used egg emojis to practice these skills. Next week for Earth Day, one of the projects we are planning is making bird feeders. Students will need to use a cookie cutter to create the shape. If you have a sturdy cookie cutter that is open on the top for your child and perhaps others to use, could you please send it to school before April 24? Reminders:
We finished choosing mavericks for our next Social Studies inquiry project. Students were surprised how few early mavericks were female. We watched a heritage minute of Emily Murphy fighting for the right for women to vote by battling to have women declared as "persons" in Canada. Some of the students wishing to have a female to study will have a more recent maverick. Students will begin researching their mavericks starting next week. We use a website from the Glenbow Museum for most of the research. https://www.glenbow.org/mavericks/ In Math we played a long division game. Students choose a number on the game board as the dividend and roll a dice for the divisor. The student taking his/her turn solves the question, the opponent uses multiplication to check the answer. The remainder becomes the points scored by the player. Alternate play. Play for ten rounds, add the points scored and the highest is the winner. Today, some students that have strong mental math skills, learned how to do short division. We will be exploring that concept more on Monday. I can't post the game board here like I intended as it has copyright restrictions but your child can show you what it looks like and you can both come up with some numbers on your own. Here are pictures of our cars in progress: Reminders:
We started today with a conversation about the woman who successfully figured out how to photograph a black hole. It evolved into a conversation about women in science, the size of earth compared to the size of the sun and the size of the sun compared to the size of a black hole. The numbers get so large, they are very hard to imagine. Here are the links we used if you would like to chat at home: https://www.huffingtonpost.ca/entry/photo-woman-researcher-black-hole_n_5cae82e7e4b0a983fce3e5ad Counting to one miillion would take 23 days if you said a number every 2 seconds. (Some of the numbers are wordy as they get higher) Counting to a billion would take almost 32 years. And, a trillion? Almost 32,000 years. We have received our first three replies to the friendly letters we mailed out last week. The students are very excited about this project. We are still receiving postcards from the Canadian schools we teamed up with so the students love it when the mail arrives! Yesterday we met with our Grade 2 buddies and played math games. The Grade 2 students are working on a special project and appreciated the help of their big buddies. Inline skating was a huge success this year! The instructor was so enthusiastic about the skills that the Grade 4 students had. He learned many of the student's names and challenged them at their personal levels.
Today seemed to fly by! We had an Internet Safety presentation from Paul Davis this morning. He is a very firm and no-nonsense speaker and he was very direct when talking to the students about safety online, social media, age limits and parental responsibility. He has given the students much to talk about with you over dinner tonight and invites all parents (no kids this time) to Vincent Massey school at 6:30 for the adult component of his presentation. I can guarantee it will be very informative and fascinating. Students sketched the blueprints for their cars today. They outlined what materials they need and how they will assemble the parts. Here are two detailed examples: Building will begin tomorrow followed by testing, redesigning and testing again. Our app from Friday is called Merged and it is rated for 4+. It is only available on iOS (iPhone, iPad). Reminders:
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Karen Cooper
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