Well folks, I can’t believe how fast our year together flew! What excellent classes I had the pleasure to teach this year and I will miss everyone over the summer months, as we all enjoy a well deserved break.

The next two days will be spent cleaning, reflecting, celebrating and looking ahead to both the summer and the upcoming school year. Today we will spend the morning in our classroom, playing review games that the students created over the past few weeks and cleaning out our desks and work spaces. In the afternoon, we will be treated to Ms. D’s “Escape the Forrest” game in our nature stadium and we will play a soccer tournament against the other elementary classes.

Tomorrow will bring our “Last Blast 2016” activities in the morning and our Celebration of Learning in the afternoon. Parents are invited to attend the Celebration of Learning, which starts at 12:30pm in the Multipurpose Room.

Again, I’d like to thank each and every parent and student for an excellent school year. It is always a great joy to see these young men and women grow and improve over the ten months we share together and I look forward to hearing all about their summer adventures in the hallways when we return to school in the fall.

School supply lists have been included with your son/daughter’s final learning report and should also be available on the school’s webpage over the summer months.

Have a fun and relaxing Canada Day weekend and a fabulous summer vacation 🙂

Bravo tout le monde! Bonnes vacances 🙂

Mme MacNevin

Our last full week of school has arrived! What a year it has been together. This should be an exciting week, as we begin to wrap things up for another year.

On Wednesday, June 22nd (rain date: Thursday, June 23rd) the Grade 4-6 classes will spend the day at Sandspit. Permission slips and money are now overdue. Please ensure they are returned to the school as soon as possible. We are hoping that the sun will shine and that we will have a fun and relaxing day together 🙂

Lets take a look at the learning we will wrap up this week…

French-This week we will finish up our board games and instructions and we will have a chance to test them out with our peers. Everyone enjoyed the film Noémie: Le secret that we watched on Friday. This week we will compare the movie to the books and discuss the similarities and differences between the two. We will also spend some time free writing in our journals, discussing book choice for our summer reading, and thinking about our goals for next year. Finally, we will finish up our read aloud novel “Moi, Noémie et les autres.”

Math-During our math periods this week we will have our final “flashback” wrap-up. We will also preview some of the math concepts that will be introduced in Grade 6 and we will spend some time playing some math games that will help to further solidify our learning from this year.

Science –This week we will wrap up our Tomatosphere project and send our results off to the Canadian Space Agency. We will also discuss what life is like for astronauts aboard space exploration shuttles and how they prepare to travel into space.

Health-This week we will finish our discussions on personal safety and hygiene.

Grade 7 Science
This week we will finish up our unit on ecosystems, discussing the importance of all organisms in an ecosystem. We will also explore succession.

Grade 8 Science
This week we will finish up our final review of the concepts we’ve been studying in Science class this year, as we prepare games to share with our classmates.

Have a fabulous week!

Mme MacNevin

There are only two more full weeks of school and as usually is the case, there is a lot of finish up before we depart for summer vacation 🙂

On Tuesday, June 22nd (rain date: June 23rd) the Grade 4-6 classes will spend the day at Sandspit. Permission slips were sent home late last week and all forms and payment for the trip are due back into me by Friday, June 17th. The cost is $12.50.

Lets take a look at the learning we will discover this week…

French-This week we will work hard on our board games. Students will use their procedural writing skills to publish the rules for their games and then create their game boards. We will also have some time this week for independent reading and responding in our “Carnet de lecture.” Finally, we will continue with our read aloud novel “Moi, Noémie et les autres” and we will have the opportunity to watch the movie “Noémie-Le sécret.” This film is based on the Noémie series by author Gilles Tibo that we’ve been reading this year. Watching the movie will provide us with the perfect opportunity to practice our listening and French oral comprehension skills. After our viewing, we will compare the movie to the books and discuss the similarities and differences between the two.

Math-With our fourth and final foundational concept quiz now complete, this week we will finish up our unit on probability. After which we will begin our final review of the concepts covered this year, in preparation for our Grade 6 Bootcamp in the fall.

Science –This week we will continue to watch our Tomatosphere seeds to monitor their progress and we will discuss how the position of the moon, the earth and the sun impact tides, seasons and eclipses. Finally, we will begin to look to the sky, as we explore stars and constellations.

Health-This week we will start discussions on personal safety and hygiene.

Grade 7 Science
This week we will continue to monitor our garbage disposal site, discuss food webs and food chains, how organisms obtain energy and the important relationship between organisms and their environment.

Grade 8 Science
This week we will finish up our unit on water systems and we will start our final review of the concepts we’ve been studying in Science class this year.

Have a wonderful week!

Mme MacNevin

Here we are into the first full week of June. I can’t believe how fast our year together has flown by!

On Thursday, June 9th we will be treated to a special year-end concert from our school bands. We always look forward to this concert, showcasing the hard work of all band students over the past few months.

Here is a snapshot of what will be happening in our classroom this week…

Dictée-This week we will be our final dictée of the year, as we finish up our review of the concepts we’ve been working on since September.

French-This week we will finish up our discussions around the novel “Sophie Lance et Compte” and put the finishing touches on our narrative texts. Later on this week, we will start to design our own board games. This project is usually a big hit with students, as they use their procedural writing skills to come up with the rules to their game and then get a chance to show off their creativity as they design it. We will also finish up our read aloud novel “Guilliaume.” Late last week, we started another very special read aloud entitled “Moi, Noémie et les autres.” In this text, Gilles Tibo, one of our favourite authors in Grade 5, finds the characters of his books coming alive, and this week we will see what adventures Mr. Tibo experiences with them.

Math-This week we will finish up our unit on transformations and start our short and final unit on probability. This important branch of mathematics helps us make informed decisions in many aspects of everyday life, from playing games to choosing medical treatments.
In this unit your child will learn to…
• Use words such as likely, unlikely, impossible, and certain
• Describe the probability of everyday events
• Compare the likelihood of two events

Probability concepts can be practiced at home as well as at school. Here are some suggestions for activities you can do at home:
• Play board games and card games with your child. Compare games that depend on chance (for example, snakes and ladders) with games that depend on skill (for example, chess). Look for games that combine chance and skill.
• Encourage your child to discuss general ideas of randomness, luck, and chance. Is it true that some people are luckier than others? Can you improve your chances by wearing a lucky pair of shoes? What does it mean to say that something happens by chance? Rather than just looking for “correct” answers, enjoy the opportunity to discover more about your child’s thinking as you explore these complex ideas together.

We will also write our fourth and final flashback quiz later on this week or early next. Students should continue their practice and we will be doing some final review over the next few days in order to fully solidify these concepts.

Science –As we travel through our unit on space, this week we will continue to discuss the earth’s rotation, discuss the life of astronauts aboard spacecrafts, and we will take part in the Tomatosphere project. In this experiment, sponsored by the Canadian Space Agency, we will plant two groups of tomato seeds. One of the groups of seeds has been to space and the other hasn’t. This project always starts lots of great discussion around the environment in space and how it may or may not be beneficial to helping our plants grow. Before the end of the school year, we will send off the results of the experiment to the Space Agency and they will let us know which group of seeds were in space and which were not.

Health-This week we will start our health unit on personal safety and hygiene. We will spend some time discussing the importance of good personal hygiene as we grow and at the steps we can take to help keep ourselves safe in our communities.

Grade 7 Science
This week we will continue to discuss both food webs and food chains and we will explore how objects decompose, as we create our own classroom garbage disposal site.

Grade 8 Science
This week we will continue to discover how the ocean is explored and how technology has helped to advance our knowledge of what lies on the ocean floor.

Have a fantastic week!

Mme MacNevin