Happy Friday the 13th everyone! I hope everyone enjoys their weekend and sneaks in a bit of spooky fun! 

A Few Reminders: 
- Fred Penner is next Thursday (Oct. 19th). Please fill out the permission forms online. 
--- We need 2 parent volunteers for this field trip.

- Fruit Orders are due October 19th. 
This is our first Grade 4 Trip fundraiser, and what a wonderful one! The fruit is awesome and they added some new products to their order list this year! To check out what the products are like you can visit their website: https://desimonefarms.com/

- No school next Friday (PD Day)

This week was short and sweet! We have been doing a lot of assessments in class, including reading, comprehension and writing. These assessments give us an idea of how students are standing coming into the year and help us, as teachers, ensure we are teaching them to their needs.

In Language Arts this week, we have been working diligently on our KidBlog posts. If you haven't checked out KidBlog yet, it is a spot where students work on daily writing tasks every morning. Through KidBlog students do "QuickWrite" type activities focusing on certain writing skills (opinion writing, personal reflection, journal writing and general sentence structure). We are still in beginning stages and I am excited to watch their progress throughout the year!

We have also worked on our Structured Word Inquiry program, this week looking at how we spell words for meaning. We looked at the word and discussed - why is there a g in sign? When we relate the word sign to signal (where we here the g) we then have to look at the meaning of both words and how they are related in a word family. If you would like to read up more on Structured Word Inquiry, you can visit Peter Bowers site. 

The students had a grammar focus lesson this week, looking at the different types of sentences. There are a few ways to classify a sentence, and this week they looked at Declarative, Interrogative, Imperative and Exclamatory sentences.

Students worked through this by identifying and creating each type of sentences. This idea will be reinforced throughout the year.





Our Patterns unit has come to an end! This week started off with students reviewing our unit through dice games, which they had so much fun with!

To practice increasing patterns, students worked in pairs with 6-sided, 9-sided and even 12-sided die! They would have one die as a starting point and then roll the second die to carry on the sequence. Then writing rules for their patterns. It was a great way to have them engaged and actively reviewing their math concepts!

 At one point it was a race to see who could complete the most patterns in two minutes! Our record was 8 patterns with 8 terms in 2 minutes!

Our Patterns Test was on Thursday, and they will be sent home today to be corrected, signed and returned for Monday. Our biggest skill to focus on is reading the whole questions and instructions. 

Gr 3 Science - Rocks, Minerals and CRYSTALS! Grade 3 students this week learned how to access google classroom via Ipads and work on a digital document. On this document they continued from last week, identifying the rock they chose from their Rock Walk in September. Students used their knowledge of the three types of rocks to try and identify which group their rock belonged to, and then described a few characteristics of their rocks.

If you would like to view your child's Rock Report, you can visit google classroom. They will need their google ID.

We also got up to some business in the kitchen as well! We are making sugar crystals! It is quite the process and looking at our experiments I think this year we may learn from a few mistakes... :)
Students are logging their crystals progress into a google doc as well. Here is one of the photos someone took to go along with procdure!



Gr 4 - This week we looked at how white light changes when refracted through a prism! Using the white light of the projector students spotted rainbows around the classroom! We then filled out a lab report about the results. Students learned that white light is separated into the Visible Spectrum which shows all 7 colours of the rainbow (ROYGBIV).