Jan 14-18

A Few Reminders: 

• Order your Pink Shirts on Powerschool this weekend! Pink Shirt day is Feb. 27.
• January 21 - 24 - Skating week! Check Calendar for times. Parents are welcome to join. Please email Ms. Potter if you would like to join us! Permission forms are online. 
• January 21 - Girls Floor Hockey tryouts begin (times TBA)
• January 28 - Grade 4's go to Rabbit Hill! Please fill out the permission forms online. 
• January 28 - Raptor Spiritwear store is open online!

ELA

Every week, we continue to work on different writing formats through KidBlog. A big focus for us this year is to pre-plan our writing in order to create stronger written pieces. 

Earlier in the year, we worked to created a web in our planning - working with who, what, where, when and how they felt about their weekend. In place of our weekend update, over the next few Mondays, we will be working on writing personal narratives of a favourite memory. Students will be experimenting with taking the main event and describing the beginning, middle and end. They will also be introduced to different ways to start a narrative to gain the reader's interest, and how to stretch sentences within their narratives to give more details. 

As we plan, we are taking out "what" and planning the main topics in the beginning, middle and end. 

Stay tuned to see the final piece!

We have also begun to work with Simple and Compound sentences. A compound sentence is when two simple statements are connects by a conjunction. We cannot create compound sentences without our FANBOYS! For, And, Nor, But, Or, Yet and So! These are the more common conjunctions we use, and will practice, when making compound sentences. 

We have been doing some sentence play in the classroom, creating simple and compound sentences and then identifying different parts of speech (noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronouns, etc) and the subject and predicate (to determine if it is a complete sentence or not). 

Book Club! 

Another Book Club started this week and we're reading Chocolate Fever by Robert Kimmel Smith. 

This week, both clubs worked on describing the main character and setting from their novels. 

Using evidence from the text, they described the character's traits and setting. 

MATH 

We are still plucking away at subtraction! This week we focused in on subtracting across zeros. This is where students have to borrow multiple times, and is often where mistakes are made. We did some practice as a group and I did a quick assessment as well.

We are moving forwards to subtraction of 3 and 4 digit numbers, with regrouping. 

I have also begun to do small focus groups and work through addition and subtraction word problems. 

SCIENCE 

SIMPLE MACHINES! Wheels, Axles, and Levers, OH MY! These simple machines have been our focus this week. As we work through our informational unit, students are working on taking visual notes while they learn! We do have some guidelines while doing this: you can uses words and pictures, only 3 - 4 colours, and you need to have some organized format. I think they're really doing an amazing job with this! 

We also did a demonstration with levers! We wanted to test how the position of the fulcrum affects the amount of effort needed when lifting a load. 

First we placed the fulcrum in the very middle of a first class lever. This was pretty tough to lift! 

Next we tried moving the fulcrum closer to the effort. This was almost impossible! 

Last, we tried moving the fulcrum closer to the load, and VOILA! Willow was able to lift me with just ONE FOOT!

Mr. Coffin even joins in on the fun!

In conclusion, the closer the fulcrum is to the load, the easier it will be to lift! 

SOCIAL 

Our region of study this week was the Rocky Mountains!This is such a beautiful and unique region in Alberta and the students enjoyed researching all about it.