Time Flies When You're Learning!

I cannot believe we are in the last week of November!

We have been busy this week!

This week we talked about common and proper nouns. The students were given a range of words and without any hints, I asked them to try and sort them into categories. It was really interesting to see how and where their minds went! Almost everyone caught onto the pattern; all the words were nouns and they organized them into 3 categories - person, place or thing. To take it further, we sorted them into common nouns (nouns used to name general things) and proper nouns (used to name a specific thing) which have used capital letters.

For Example:

Common Noun = school 

Proper Noun = Robina Baker Elementary School

Our reading focus this week was to be able to determine the main idea of a non-fiction text. We defined main idea as what the text is mostly about. When we have decided what the main idea is, we have to be able to identify which sentences or facts in our reading can be supporting details. We practiced these skills as a whole class, as well as, in smaller groups and individually. 

In Math, we have continued to further our number sense in working with representing numbers in expanded form and comparing numbers up to 10, 000. 

In Social we have been busy bees! We discussed the importance of the oil sands in Alberta and and how our natural resources help shape our province's identity. We started local by researching and discussing the discovery of Leduc #1! In pairs, students navigated through the Discovery Center's webpage to record some facts and compare how the station looked then and now. Next we looked at the Alberta Oil Sands and practiced our procedural writing to explain how to remove oil from the oil sands. 

We know that fossil fuels are a non-renewable resource, as they can only be used once and take millions of years to form. These resources help form Alberta's identity by creating jobs to our population and help provide energy (such as electricity or gasoline) in our homes and communities. There are also renewable resources for energy, sun, wind and pig poop (ask them about it) that we can use to produce energy as well. 

In Art, our trees are coming along! We identified which colours on our colour wheel are considered warm or cold, and then we coloured our squares accordingly! I think they're turning our great!! 

Have a wonderful weekend!