Miss Potter's Corner: We're Back! Jan 7-11

A Few Reminders:

January 11 - Ms. Potter Away all day.
January 18 - Elder Florence Visit during Assembly
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!

I hope everyone had a lovely break! Our week started off we a new house sorting! Students were sorted into new houses for the next semester.

Once in house they had some time for House Huddles. This is going to be a time for the students to gather in their house and have about 10-15 minutes of topic guided peer conversation. This week they discussed their breaks! It was great to see them interacting with each other and going outside their immediate friend circles to share.

After their sharing time, they worked on their KidBlog posts sharing about their break in writing.

We also had special visitor this week - Ms. Betty and her new pup MOLLY!

ELA

Reading

This month, I will be working with students in small group book clubs. During this time, students will work on practicing reading strategies, reading aloud to their peers, analysis of characters, theme and setting. The first group I am working with is reading Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl.

At the end of the month the students will work on summary projects on their books.

Writing

First thing we did this week was talk about resolutions! As it is that time of year. However, this year I wanted students to take what we have learned throughout of Waste and our World unit and write a special type of resolution - Earth Conscious ones!

As inspiration I showed the students this video about packaging in Australia to light the fire on how we can work to reduce the amount of waste created by people.

As a class, we discussed the different ways we can realistically work towards being more earth conscious through recycling, reducing, and reusing items!

They came up with some wonderful and creative ways to help our Earth in 2019!

Math

We have started our unit on subtraction! Throughout the week, we have been working on retraining our brains to subtract numbers instead of add! This can be a tougher transition than you think!

Students have been working on estimating differences - this is really tough for them! They all want to do the exact math, which is wonderful, but they cannot make the tie between rounding & estimating. When estimating you round a number and then subtract to find a estimated difference.

They have also begun to work with subtraction problems that require regrouping. We are taking time and doing lots of practice!

Science

We're onto a new unit! Wheels & Levers! We had a great introduction to this unit and got to do hands on tasks when the Bennett Center came in November.

This will be a quick information and demo based unit. We will work through new information, and then observe demonstrations of Simple Machines.

This week we looked at ROLLERS! This simple machine, like most machines, helps us put in LESS effort on tasks. We demonstrated this by moving students across the room using rollers! Watch the videos below to see our attempts today!

Science Trial Videos

TRIAL 1 - No Rollers

We observed and B's effort to move W on a scale of 1 - 5, and then B shared what she felt. The average was a 4 on this trial.

TRIAL 2- With Rollers

Everyone was in shock and awe as W glided easily across the floor by just a small push from B.

We took turns moving across the room on the rollers so everyone could feel how little effort was needed.

Catch up from 2018

We had a few students who finished up their product flow charts before the break! We had 3 classes to work on them before break, and one this week. There are still a few students who need to finish!