Happy Thanksgiving

Happy Thanksgiving from 4B!

This week we listened to a story, Turkey Trouble by Wendi Silvano and decided we needed to convince Farmer Jake that he shouldn't eat turkey this Thanksgiving. We wrote friendly letters, from the perspective of the turkey, trying to persuade Farmer Jake to try a different meal this year. The letters turned out great and the alternative meal suggestions were fantastic!

We did an Art project to go along with our turkey writing project. The students gathered leaves, painted them and then arranged them on their paper to create turkey feathers. They assembled the turkey body and head and attached it to the paper with their twig legs. They turned out so well!

We had a guest reader in on Friday to read a story to our class. 

Thank you Mrs. Klaassen for reading to us!

In Science, we completed our Composting Life Cycle poster. The students were given more information regarding each stage and had to write a description of each, in their own words. 

We also learned about the differences between the 3R's - Reduce, Reuse and Recycle. The students were put into groups and together they had to decide which R their pictures fit best under. This created some great discussions, to decide where they fit best on our board.

We also worked on a Hazardous Waste research assignment where the students used QR codes to visit 2 different websites (air pollution and land pollution). They could use the "reading feature" on their chromebooks to listen to the information presented on these sites. Then they had to fill in 3 things they learned, 2 interesting facts and 1 question they have. 

We are all set up on Mathletics! The students love this online math resource and I have set their classroom activities on Mathletics to mirror what we are learning in math class. The usernames and passwords are in your child's agenda and they can login and play at home!

In P.E. we have been working on a variety of manipulative skills (throwing and catching) but the kids especially loved whole body, Rock, Paper, Scissors as a warm up game this week.

SOCKTOBER sock donations are coming in....THANK YOU!

Orange Shirt Day

On Monday, September 30th our class wore orange in recognition of Orange Shirt Day!

We completed the following Kidblog post:

Today is Orange Shirt Day.

It was 1973. Six-year-old Phyllis Webstad was excited about her first day at St. Joseph’s Residential School in Williams Lake, B.C. Her granny had bought her a new, bright orange shirt for the occasion. But when she proudly arrived at the school, her excitement turned to terror. The staff cut her hair. She was forced to change out of her clothes. Her new shirt was taken away, and she never got it back. “The colour orange has always reminded me of that, and how my feelings didn’t matter, how no one cared, and how I felt I was worth nothing, ” Saying you are sorry for something done that was wrong and hurt people is a good first step, but you also need to do things to try to help fix the hurt.

We are wearing orange today to demonstrate that every child matters. Tell me why you matter using a proper paragraph format.

An example of a topic sentence could be:

Orange shirt day is to celebrate that every child matters. I matter because...

They began by posting their paragraph on Kidblog, then they edited their own work and copied the paragraph onto a shirt to display on our board. We loved reading all the wonderful things about the students in 4B and why they matter!

  

We also had a guest, Elder Sydney Courtepatte, out to RBES to speak to the students. He spoke about the different animal hides that are used to make a variety of traditional clothing items. 

In Math, we worked through patterns in T-tables, patterns involving time and problem solving with patterns. We completed a check-in quiz and moved on to calendar patterns. 

We also completed some basic math facts games with dice. The kids had a lot of fun racing each other to complete the addition and subtraction questions. 

In Science, we are working on our Composting Life Cycle posters. We watched a couple videos and read Wiggling Worms at Work by Wendy Pfeffer. The students have put in a lot of effort assembling their posters and will be completing some research next week to add information to each stage of the life cycle. 

Our WeSearch Wednesday Kidblog post was a research opinion paragraph about the best method of waste disposal. We went over the pros and cons to Open Air Dumps, Landfills and Incinerators. The kids were then asked to chose the best method. 

Our grammar focus this week was on simple and compound sentences. A simple sentence is a complete thought with a subject and a predicate. A compound sentence is two simple sentences put together with a comma and a conjunction. The students were taught FANBOYS as the acronym to remember the conjunction words: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so. 

For P.E. this week, we worked through 8 locomotor stations. 

For Art we created beautiful fall trees! The branches were blown with watered down tempra paint and when dry, leaves were added with acrylic paint. They turned out so well!

Congratulations to our September Laser Tag winner!