Week in Review Week 7 (October 14-18) "The Prairies"

Hi Everyone,

This was another fun filled week of learning. One of our big focus' of this week was the prairies, specifically learning about landforms. We learned about the flat fields in the prairies as well as the mountains. Both are distinctly different regions of the prairies. Many of us connected this to different family trips that we've gone on to Banff, or driving to Edmonton seeing the open fields. We brainstormed different descriptive words to describe each region. For the mountains, we said that they were humongous, snowy, bumpy, cold and forested. With some of theses descriptive words we were tasked to create descriptive sentences about the region. We did a great job, moving away from sentences such as "I see mountains" to "I see snowy, cold mountains". We also had an opportunity to draw each region in our visual journals, as well as do some art with the water colour pencil crayons on Friday, drawing a horse in a prairie field.

In math, we have continued our inquiry into number sense. We have been doing a great job organizing our information when building with cuisenaire rod and finding the total value or sum. We transitioned this week to understanding what the total sum really means. Place value is an important understanding of what numbers are made up of (25 is made of 2 10's and 5 1's). Having a strong understanding of place value will help us as we continue with addition and subtraction, as well as other operations (multiplication and division) as we get older. This week we worked on representing numbers different ways (using place value charts and base ten blocks, with playing cards finding the sum of two or more cards, with cuisenaire rods and with tens frame cards).

In science, we continued our inquiry into magnets. In the week prior we build a maze, and using the attraction principle guided a paper clip through the maze. This week we made mazes and using the repulsion principle tried to guide our magnets through the maze. This served to be a lot more difficult than the attraction mazes as it took precise and delicate movements. As we conclude our magnets unit, students will have an opportunity to create something that uses a magnet. Stay tuned!

In word work we are continuing with our single and double grapheme words. This week we focused on the sounds of "ng", "v", "z" and "w". Word work has been serving as a great opportunity to practice our spelling. This has translated into our writing as I am seeing an increase number of words being spelt correctly.

In " WOW" writing, we have been doing an amazing job increasing our writing stamina as well as the level of detail. The picture this week that garnered the most interest was an abstract picture where we were able to write about what we see. Everyone had an opportunity to share with the class what they saw and it was awesome to hear all the different things as well as their justification as to why they saw what they saw. Some saw birds, dragons, faces, a ship and a turtle to name a few.

Home reading has been going well as many students have been bringing their home reading books back and exchanging them for new ones. Just a reminder that students are able to read either their home reading books, raz kids or their library books but please remember to fill out the tracking sheet whenever they are reading!

Important dates for next week

Tuesday October 22nd is picture day!

Well that is all for now. As always, if there are any questions or concerns please feel free to e-mail me at mdnishimura@cbe.ab.ca

Have a great weekend!

-Mr. N-