September 3-6, 2019

Welcome to the Grade 5/6 Blog for Ms. Parent’s Class!

This is the place you will come to find out what is happening in our learning space, upcoming events and reminders of things such as school notices that have been sent home. Please ensure you check the blog weekly so you don’t miss our updates and important information.

Important Information:

Student Packages

Information for students and forms went home this week in a brown envelope. Please review the information with your son/daughter and fill out the necessary forms as soon as possible. Please note that some forms are two sided so please ensure you check both sides. If you have any questions about the forms or information provided, please phone the office to speak with Ms. McLeod.

Additionally, student demographic verification forms went home this week as well (white sheets). Please verify the information, make necessary changes and return them as soon as possible.

Visual Journal Covers- Magazine/Pictures needed

We will be creating collages on the front of our visual journals this week! If you have a few gently used/old magazines (1-3) that you could share for the class to use, it would be greatly appreciated. Students can also bring in special pictures from home that can be used to glue on the front of their journals. We will start the collages next week.

Field Trip Reminders

As we start the year, it is a good time to consider checking on your police clearance status as they typically take 1-1.5 months to go through. Call the office and speak to Ms. McLeod if you are not sure of the status of your current clearance.

Calgary Campus Open Minds: Seed School Announcement

Ms. Parent’s class is excited to announce that we will be attending a weeklong learning opportunity off-site at the Mustard Seed this year!! This learning space is not at the shelter where individuals may reside, but instead is located in beautiful downtown Calgary. We will have the opportunity to focus on our school-wide learning intention around voice as well as to consider ways that we can find innovative solutions to concerns we are passionate about- which is super exciting! We will find our voice as change makers in our communities. 

We will be attending Seed School from March 9^th-13^th and the work we do in our classroom will guide the learning this week. We will need 4-5 volunteers per day for this week. This work will also be tied to a new partnership we will be forming with grade 10 students at Joane Cardinal-Schubert High School this year (another exciting announcement!!). More information on this will be shared soon!!

Important Dates

September 10^th: Picture Day

September 19^th: Parent/Teacher Conferences: 3:30-7:30pm

September 20^th: Parent/Teacher Conferences: 8:00-11:10am

Highlights from Our Week: please ask me to expand or share details on our activities.

Visual Journals: We started our visual journal set-up by numbering pages, setting aside pages to reinforce our covers and to create a pocket for things we are working on, and to create a space for our table of contents. This will help us with organizing our information and to show us ways to keep our learning spaces organized chronologically.

We created a page for our daily reflection on something we learned each day for the month of September. Additionally, we created a page to show some of the highlights from our summer.

We visited the curiosity case and used a thinking routine called “See, Think, Wonder, Sketch” to share our thoughts and ideas about the display of artifacts we observed.

Reflection Writing

We had a couple of writing blocks to share some of our experiences in the design challenge this week.

Music

We had our first music class with Mrs. Anderson

Art

We met with Ms. Ferrari this week and worked on creating beautiful designs on brown bags that will be used for lunches for students across our city who need lunches to be provided for them.

Digital Citizenship

Students discussed the importance of their online activity including ways to be safe, personal devices at school and proper use of technology during learning activities.

Ten Counters

A game of strategy in math which requires us to think ahead as we attempt to get the last piece or two.

Drama/Cooperative Games

We have been playing a variety of games as a large group (all 3 classes) to help us develop cooperative relationships and to get to know one another.

Design Challenge

It’s Not a Box: Students have been working together to create their own projects based on the story Not a Box. They have been tasked with going through different stages of collaborative design challenges to create something out of 4 cardboard boxes that demonstrate creativity and collaboration. They began the week in an ideation phase where they were to take turns sharing a potential build idea that was not a box. Students had to converge those ideas down to a few they felt excited about and then to narrow that down to one as a whole group. The biggest design constraint was that students were not able to start talking once they began their builds which required students to ensure they developed strategies around the constraint in their planning phase. Additionally, students were asked to consider how they can ensure they always have a meaningful role (in their learning in generally and within this particular challenge).