Here are this week’s reminders:
On Tuesday we will be having a visit from the Island Storm basketball team. They will share a message with the students and will hopefully show off some of their talent 🙂
Teachers and support staff will be attending professional development sessions on Friday, January 31st and thus, there will be no classes for students on that date.
Here’s what’s happening inside our classroom this week:
Grade 5
French- This week for our dictée we will start our work on homophones; words that sound that same but are spelled differently and have different meanings. The French language is full of homophones! This week we will be exploring two groups of homophones: est/es/ai/et and peu/peut/peux. As always, students will be responsible to work on their practice exercises at home each evening; in addition to the work we will do together in class, in preparation for their dictée on Day 6.
During our Reader’s Workshop this week we will look at the endings of words in French. Many students become confused with the endings of verbs ex. é, e, er, ez, ent, etc. We will examine ways to understand each of these endings, how they are pronounced and their meanings, in order to further our reading comprehension and fluency. We will also continue to work on our individual reading goals, responding to our reading with high order thinking. In the coming days, we will begin an author study on Mr. Gilles Tibo, a popular children’s author, and will work towards starting book clubs exploring his books and his style of writing.
We are nearing the end of our unit on poetry. This week, we will finish up writing our poems and will continue to revise and edit them in preparation for our poet’s café. If time permits, we will start to publish our poems and practice reading them aloud.
In math, we will continue on with our work on decimals numbers and how they relate to fractions. This week we will discover thousandths (three places after the decimal point) and we will start to see the relation between decimal numbers, measurements and money.
Science- We are continuing to examine the weather. Students should be keeping track of precipitations and weather patterns in their weather journals. We will also be having some discussions in class about different weather phenomena that exists here in Canada and around the world.
Our preparations for the Science Fair are well under way. This week, students need to provide me with their question and in class we will be working on our hypothesis. At home, students should be working at starting their experiments and documenting their results.
Social Studies-Students are continuing their study of Canadian historical figures and explorers. This week, they will present their projects on a famous explorer to the class. After this project, we will be taking a short break from Social Studies and Mme Isabelle will be helping the students prepare their science projects during her classes with them leading up to the Science Fair.
Grade 7 and 8 Science
Students are reminded that they should now have their questions for the Science Fair handed in. This week, they should be working on researching their topic and formulating their hypothesis. During our classes together, we will be finishing up our unit on solutions and mixtures, examining WHIMIS symbols and how they are used to remind us of the dangers of using chemical solutions and the proper precautions we should take when we see these symbols.
Have a marvelous week!
Madame April Walker