September 17-21

A Few Reminders!

Grade 4 Parents:

We have an exciting opportunity coming to our school next month. Blue Flame Kitchen from Atco Gas will be coming in to do an in school field trip for our students in October. The program cost is $15.75, however this cost will be completely covered using our nutrition grant funding that our school received this year. The program will teach students nutritional information as well as have a hands on component. Through there is no cost associated with this trip, we still need you to log into your PowerSchool account to complete a permission form. Please complete this form by Friday, September 21st.

• Please fill out the Verification Forms through Powerschool. This includes a Walking Field Trip form, which students will need completed in order to join the Terry Fox Walk on Friday Afternoon. 
• Picture Day! Wednesday is our picture day, however, if your child is in Cross Country they will have their picture taken on Thursday. 
• LDAA Cross Country is next Wednesday. 
• ADSavings Book orders are due next Wednesday. 
• Terry Fox Walk is on Friday afternoon! Bring a toonie for Terry!
• October 1st is Orange Shirt Day. Click here to learn about Orange Shirt day! 

ELA
Through Read Aloud time, I try to introduce students to different books with series encouraging them to try reading new genres. This month, we have start The Spiderwick Chronicles by Tony DiTerlizzi and Holly Black. As I read, through discussion, we practice questioning reading strategies, predicting what will happen next, and summarizing what happens in each chapter.

Students have also begun typeclub! This year we are working on our keyboarding skills, as we use chromebooks very often in the classroom. Students spend 10-15 minutes working on their homerow typing and they absolutely love it! They work so hard and are cruising through their lessons.

We have also started Wesearch Wednesday on KidBlog! This is my favourite day of the week to introduce to the students. On this daily quick write, students will learn how to read through various non fiction resources, to research a specific topic. Through the year they will work on answering questions, creating their own questions, and summarizing information. 

To kick this year off, I reached out to the students to see what topics they would like to research over the year. They had some awesome ideas!! I can't wait to get started on some of them! 

MATH

We are starting to build on our knowledge of increasing and decreasing patterns, and have begun to extend and identify pattern rules.

When given an pattern rule (i.e. Start at 56, add 6 each time) students were asked to extend the pattern. We also worked through word problems, using patterns to solve them.
This was a skill some students still required help, and reinforcement with. An example would be:

Blake had 15 dollars in her piggy bank. Every day she bus a muffin for 2 dollars. After 3 days how much money would she have left?

 Try working through this with your child! 

Students also worked to look at a sequence and identify the pattern rule. They practiced this with partners! In the hall they worked with pairs, one partner creating a sequence and the second partner had to identify the rule. Looking at each term in the sequence, they find the difference and identify the rule. They created some awesome sequences!

We also took some time to work with hundreds charts, looking for number patterns. using bingo chips, students worked through skip counting by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 and looked for patterns in the numbers.

We then discussed how these each number is a multiple of the number we are skip counting by, and related it to multiplication. Then we noticed some patterns in the ones place!

Look at the bold blue terms, these were key vocabulary terms from the week. Quiz your child! Can they explain them? 

SOCIAL

We are still working through our mapping unit, covered titles, labels and reading and drawing ccompass roses. 

SCIENCE

We are starting our unit on Waste and our World! To kick it off, we played a Kahoot game to see what students may already know. 

Next, we brainstormed all the things we think are waste. 

Waste is things we have used, and no longer need. 

In partners students worked on KWL charts about Waste in Google Slides. What do you know? What are examples of waste? In Google slides they also added images from the web to accompany their writing. 

 They also will add questions they have about our unit, and throughout the unit they can come back to this document and add to it. 

September 10-13

We have been getting busy in the classroom! 

A Few Reminders: 

• No School Sept. 14th  - PD DAY
• Sept. 26th - AD-Mazing Orders due 
• Sept. 26th - School Photos
• Sept. 28th Terry Fox Run - Bring a toonie for Terry!

ELA

We have been hard at working learning new routines and expectations in the classroom. One routine we focused on this week was our Read to Self time. First we talked about what students like about reading. 

Do you like being read to? Reading out loud? Reading to yourself? What types of books do you like?

This gives me a little insight into how our year where go and how we will go about our reading time. 

Together we made a beautiful poster to put up in our reading corner! 

Students will colour and decorate this for our wall!

Next we talked about what Read to Self looks like and sounds like. By this age students have a pretty good idea of what behaviour is expected of them, and they have really proven themselves over the week! We have a big group of book lovers and avid readers! 

At first we started with reading in our desks, and eventually as students built their stamina they were able to move around the room. 

 During this time, I have been meeting with students to work on finding a long term reading book that piques their interest, and is at their reading level. These are some of my favourite conversations to have with students, because I get to hear what they love about books, what worlds they like to be in when they read, and find them a good book or series they will really enjoy.

We started KidBlog this week! Kidblog is an online journal, where we have daily quick writes. Students can answer review and respond to their peers writing, as well as, ask questions of each other.

In order to log on, your child will need to visit Ms. Potter's KidBlog  and log in with google
(they will need to know their google ID). On Mondays students will journal write on KidBlog, where they will work on focus writing skills from previous week. As this was our first week, students talked about a subject they are all pretty much experts on - themselves! On Wednesday, students had a chance to respond to each other's posts and leave comments. We have a discussion as a class about how to comment appropriately, and follow some guidelines. 

Next week we will start introducing the other daily topics. 

We also worked on how to Stretch a Sentence when writing this week. This is how we get our sentences to go from 1 STAR rating, to 5 STARS. When writing a sentence, we want to ask ourselves a few questions to make sure our sentence is interesting to the reader and full of detail. Together we stretched many sentences on animals and students worked on adding adjectives to their who to really paint a picture in the reader's mind. 

Math 

This week we have been working on patterns, and more specifically increasing and decreasing number patterns. We focus on the basic skills of counting up, catching the number in your hand and counting up to follow the pattern. As well as, counting back. This basic skill also comes in handy when we are adding numbers up to 10 000. 

Next week, we will start discussing how to identify a pattern rule, and extend a pattern. 

Science 

Every year we start with understanding the scientific method. This is the process to how and why experiments are carried out. We work with the following steps: 

• Question: based on your personal interest and knowledge, what are you wanting to research and conduct and experiment about? 
• Hypothesis: based on what you know and have read - what is your best guess as to what will happen?
• Materials: What items will you need to conduct your experiment?
• Procedure: What are the steps to your experiment?
• Observations/Data: What did you see? Collect? Record?
• Conclusion: What did you find out from your experiment?

As a class, we conducted an experiment - using a hair dryer to suspend a ping pong ball in the air! This experiment demonstrates how air pressure works. 

I also introduced to students our optional, year long, science project! Please check out the Science Project tab on this blog for more info. 

Social

Our first unit to explore is mapping. In small groups, students looked at various maps and tried to determine what they could see and find on the maps. Students were given various formats to observe and they came up with lots of findings! 

                 

Next, we looked at the various landforms that are found on our earth and create a Landform's Visual Dictionary! 

SPECIAL EVENTS

BUS SAFETY

These kiddos sure rocked it this year! They started off with a pop quiz game and then headed out for their practice bus evacuation! They all passed with flying colours! 

We were so fortunate to have Motivational Magic return to our school! Steve Harmer put on quite the magic show, all while teaching students the value of friendship. AND HE PULLED A RABBIT OUT OF HIS HAT!

Welcome Back!

This blog will be a space where you can stay up to date with our school events and happenings, what we're learning and discovering in the classroom, and some fun photos of us in action! 

It is so great to see everyone fresh faced and ready for a new year! I can tell heaps of fun was had over the summer, and can't wait to hear everyone's stories this week. 

Here is a quick peak into our room this year!

A Few Reminders: 

• Sept. 12th is the deadline for Hot Lunch Orders  
• Sept 13th - Motivational Magic Performance at 9:00 am.
• Thursday, Sept. 13 at 6:30 pm - Parent Information Night for Camp Warwa. This will be an information session on the fundraising, volunteers needed and exciting news about our year end trip to Camp Warwa. 
• No School Sept. 14th  - PD DAY
• Sept. 26th - AD-Mazing Orders due 
• Sept. 26th - School Photos
• Sept. 28th Terry Fox Run - Bring a toonie for Terry!

Our Week!

 This year started off with students grabbing their acceptance letters from the fireplace, and heading to find a desk. 

As we settle in, we're getting used to new routines, meeting new friends and talking about our summers! It sounds like everyone had an awesome break! 

Right off the start, students were sorted into their houses! This is classroom management tool, that helps reinforce positive behaviours and encourage participation in classroom discussions. 

I always like to start the year off getting to know the kiddos and we created  HAVE YOU SEEN THIS WIZARD posters where students share about their favourite, food, colours, and activities in a creative way! 

Can you match these Magical People to their Wanted Posters?

    

Students also worked on a summer writing project. This is a quick chance for me to get snapshot of them as writers (especially after two months off) and see what they can do! To get this snapshot, students created some Summer Selfies! We talked about how to pick one event from our summer (our watermelon seed) and how to expand and talk about it. 

I think lots of students were excited to share, because they got right down to work doing amazing jobs! 

We also had a Facebook video win! Over the summer you may have seen videos of a Rock Paper Scissors hoola hoop game, and we gave it a shot! It was a pretty fun way to practice our hopping skills from hoop to hoop, challenge friends and then when there was points gained students had to complete a fitness action (i.e. 10 jumping jacks, runing on the spot for 30 seconds).