Week in Review Week 5 (September 30th-October 4th) "Every Child Matters"

Hi Family and Friends,

This week, here were some of our favorite things that we did this week in the eyes of the kids.

"We did WOW writing about what makes us happy" - Rebeca
"We painted with magnets" - Fatehveer
"We went to the library and got new books" - Alisha
"We did word work" - Prabdeep
"We went outside for gym and did relay races" - Becky
"We only go outside when other people don't on Wednesdays and Mondays" - Prishila
"We used computers for Math, writing , working and playing on it" - Ashleen
"We worked on the computers to test how good we are at math" - Ezekielle
"We used the computers for Raz-Kids" - Aris

In Word Work this week, we continued with reviewing our letter sounds. We have almost gone through all of the individual letter sounds and have started reviewing double grapheme letter sounds. Our first double grapheme sound we went over this week was the "ai" sound which makes an "a" sound. We found this grapheme in words like tail, mail, and chair. Next week we will continue with our double grapheme sounds.

In "WOW" writing, we had different picture prompts that allowed us to access Math, Social Studies and ELA. Our "WOW" writing has allowed us to reflect, and build our reasoning and justification of thoughts. The one WOW piece this week that I was very happy about was a Math writing prompt. In Math we have been working on identifying values of cuisenaire rods and finding the sum of the rods. A picture of a "M" was put up on the board and the task was to identify the sum of the blocks. The kids did an amazing job identifying that the value of the dark blue was 9 and the value of the green was 6. Therefore making the addition sentence 9+6+6+9. Many were able to solve for the sum of 30. What was awesome was that there were many different ways of coming to the answer of 30. In the following weeks, we will continue to build on our addition sense and develop greater efficiency in solving problems.

As mentioned above, in Math we have been working on addition through the use of cuisenaire rods. We have identified the value of all the different blocks and this week we built our names using the blocks to find the value of the letters. There were many creative ways of building letters and we were able to work through finding the values our names. After building our names and finding the values, we were able to build our own creations to find the values.

In Science we continued our inquiry into magnets. This week we focused on the concepts of attraction and repulsion. We learned that when two opposite poles touch (north and south, or south and north) they will attract and come together. However when two of the same poles (north and north, or south and south) come together, they will repel. We used the concept of attraction to create and using the attraction property, guide a paper clip through the maze. This was a lot of fun!

We also used our concept of attraction while doing art. We learned about abstract art, and how it utilizes shapes, colour and lines instead of objects to tell a story or share an idea. We looked at different pieces of abstract art and connected and reflected about the pieces. Then it was our turn to create our own abstract art. We used our paper clips and magnets, along with our favourite colors to create our own abstract masterpieces. We named our pieces and will write about them next week.

In Social, we recognized Orange Shirt Day on Monday. We learned that Orange Shirt Day originated from a First Nations girl (Phyllis Webstand) wore an Orange shirt to Residential School. When she arrived she was forced to remove the shirt, and with that her identity. We have shared stories and reflected on what it would be like if we attended Residential School. We are very lucky to have the opportunity to celebrate our cultures, speak our home languages, eat the food we love and do the things we want to do. We made leaves with messages about what is important to us (Family, Belonging, Culture ext). This was strung to our hoop resembling a dreamcatcher with the powerful message that "Every Child Matters".

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

Have a great weekend everyone!

Best Regards,

Mr. N