Sept. 16-27th, 2019

Important Information

Orange Shirt Day - September 30 (Monday)

Monday is Orange Shirt Day. Students are asked to wear an orange shirt (or their favorite shirt if they do not have one) to honor the children who attended residential schools and those who continue to be impacted by the legacy to this day. The assembly that the grade 5/6 students will be leading, will begin at 12:30pm and end around 1:30pm

Important Dates

September 30: Orange Shirt Day Assembly - Wear an orange shirt

October 9: Fun Lunch

October 11: PD Day - No school for students.

October 14: Thanksgiving – School is closed.

October 23: Fun Lunch

Highlights for the last two weeks: Please ask your son or daughter to expand on this

(Unfortunately my post last week was lost in translation- I’m sorry!)

Parent Conferences:

Thank you so much for the incredible conference last week! I loved having a chance to sit down with you and learn more about what you are hoping for your son/daughter this year. I am VERY excited to go on our learning journey with each of them. If you were unable to make the conference, please email me and book a time that we can meet.

Social: Orange Shirt Day & Terry Fox

We have spent some time getting to know Terry Fox’s journey over the last two weeks and on Friday we went to the ridge and ran for Terry and other important people in our lives.

The grade 5/6 students have been preparing for the Orange Shirt Day assembly on Monday. We have been listening to stories, discussing different elements and themes that have arisen from the stories of residential schools, creating an art piece that interpreted the words from the story titled “The Orange Shirt Day Story” and have recorded the words of that story to share with the school on Monday. We have also met in circle to consider why we acknowledge the land and who has traditionally lived here, why it is important to connect to it and how we find ways to connect to the land we live on. There are a few students who will be sharing their responses to these questions at the assembly on Monday!

We attempted to watch a video created through the Calgary foundation to help develop a deeper understanding of why it is important to acknowledge the land we call home. Please feel free to watch this video with your families at home. We will watch try to watch it again on Monday.

Art with Ms. Ferrari:

We worked with Ms. Ferrari to create some art related to an artist from Alberta. Ask me who the artist is or how I was inspired by that art to create my own piece.

Science: Wetlands

We have been continuing with our initial lessons into the wetlands and have watched a Bill Nye video to help us continue to develop some initial concepts of wetlands. We have been actively watching the video as we take notes to document important things we hear on our mind maps that we created. We are looking to identify concepts such as: what are wetlands? What are some different types of wetlands and how do we identify them? What are some of the important functions of a wetland? What constitutes a healthy wetland? Who relies on wetlands? What are some factors that create unhealthy wetlands? Additionally, as we have been thinking of these things, we have had conversations around ecosystems and how everything is connected. We related this concept, in part, to human activity and the impact on wetlands. We talked about indigenous ways of knowing and being on the land and how they attempted to live on the land in a way that considered how they were leaving the land for the next seven generations. We additionally discussed the different structures used in considering the connections to land, animals, plants, rocks etc. and how that looks different in traditional indigenous ways of knowing and the way we sometimes view that structure today. We know that traditionally on this land, which continues in indigenous ways of being, that it was believed everything was connected, that everything had a purpose and a spirit and an equal place in the circle. We discussed that today, we often move away from the circle and instead think of the structure as a hierarchy, with humans being at the top. We talked about what happens when we make decisions for today that might not consider the impact on tomorrow; for instance, building homes, roads or shopping malls in areas that were once wetlands. The kids had a really rich conversation around environmental impacts and were practicing the concepts we have been working on in building our collaborative culture (yay for plussing!). This conversation touched on future science unit concepts as we considered the impacts of losing wetlands and trees on our climate and our carbon footprint.

Writing:

Much of our writing over the past couple of weeks have related do the variety or curriculum being covered in our classes. This has included thinking routines, reflections and some Just Write time. We also discussed what a time capsule is and linked that to a letter we wrote to our future selves. Additionally, we captured some writing using our senses at Fish Creek (although our time was impacted by the decision of a few students to stomp on a wasp nest which meant we had to walk quite a bit future to access some of the wetlands in Fish Creek). We will use that writing to create a poem next week.

Computers:

Students had the first day of computers last week and we were trying to ensure that everyone could log in, had passwords complex enough for Google apps, to make sure they could access the blog, their gmail (and to send me an email), that they could access google apps and a math website called math playground. They also used computers last week to input some data for their MIPI assessment.

Math Diagnostic Assessment: Grade 5/6 classes were given a math assessment, to see what they remembered from their previous academic year. It was called the Mathematics Intervention/Programming Instruction assessment (MIPI). This is an assessment a CBE wide assessment. It is being used as a diagnostic tool, and is not used for grading purposes. We are currently analyzing and reviewing them.

In math, we have also been playing a math game called exploding cauldrons which has a few different variations that we have been trying. This week we were asked to look at numbers up to 25 and were given 3 cauldrons and we have to look at possible combinations of numbers placed in the cauldrons to see what the highest number we can get in without exploding them.

Visual Journals/Catch Up Time;

We have spent some time working on personalizing our visual journal covers over the last couple of weeks and it currently ties in with our catch-up time.

Patrol Training

Many of us afternoon in patrol training on Monday this week.

Have a great weekend everyone!