January 15 -19

A Few Reminders:
- Skating is Monday - Thursday next week. Please send students with skates, helmets and mitts. There will be some skates and helmets to borrow.
- Grade3 - India Culture day will be on Friday January 26th. Please check on Powerschool for forms.

 Peter Bowers will be visiting our school for a Professional Development session on Thursday. Our class is one of the classes he will be working with! We are very excited!




January 29th is our first Ski Day for Grade 4's! Our day will look as follows:

Time	Activity
8:25am	Load bus
8:30am	Bus leaves for Rabbit Hill
8:50am	Bus arrives at Rabbit Hill
9:00am-3:40pm	skiing/snowboarding
3:40pm	Load bus
3:45pm	Bus leaves for Robina Baker
4:00pm	Bus arrives at Robina Baker

Every child is required to take a lesson at their level and will then have the opportunity to free ski the remainder of the day. Students require a bagged lunch and proper winter wear.

- Edmonton Symphony (HMS Pinafore) is a Grade 4 field trip on February 1st. Please fill out the permission forms online. 

Reading

We are revisiting Summarizing: knowing how ti find, organize, and retell important facts or story elements. I read aloud the book The Princess and the Pig to the students and we summarized the story using the "Somebody, Wanted, But, So, Then" Model. 

First we looked at these words and tried to decided how they related to the elements of a story (Characters, Setting, Problem, Solution). Then we discussed where in the story (beginning, middle and end) these elements showed up. When we retell a story, we want to only tell the important things, and ensure we tell them in sequence.

Students worked in pairs to summarize The Princess and the Pig in their own words. 

Writing

Every year, there comes a time where we all revisit a writing classic: Show, Don't Tell! This is when we try to describe what is happening in a story, without actually saying. 

As a warm up, we played a very fun game of Emotions Charades! 

Students acted out emotions, and then we jotted down some of the actions that showed us that emotion (i.e. TVS biting his nails, with a frown on his face, shows us hes nervous!).  After we had a bunch of different ways to describe emotions we took to writing. 

Students transformed "Tell" sentences into "show" sentences!

Math 

It's time to Multiply! We introduced Mutliplication to the Grade 3's this week, and reinforced some facts with Grade 4. 

The strategy of multiplication we focused on this week was repeated addition. It is important for the students to understand, when we are multiplying we are adding equal groups. 

Students worked on turning repeated addition into multiplication number sentences, and vice versa. 

Science 4:

We had a lot of experiments to check in on this week! 

First stop - Which toilet paper decomposes the best? 

Students observed their toilet paper samples a week later to see how they were holding up, and the winner was.... KIRKLAND brand! 

We then regrouped and discussed what benefits this would have on our enviroment, and in our sewer systems. 

Next Stop - Dig up the Lettuce! 

Students dug up their lettuce leaf to see how it was holding up! This year our lettuce held out a little better than in the past! While it was still green, it seemed to have shrunk and had moisture taken from the lettuce. It also was weaker and had broken into smaller pieces. 

We also held a week long experiment of garbage collection! We sorted out garbage all week into student created categories: Paper, Plastic, Paper recyclable, Organic and Foil waste. On Friday we weighed all our waste! 

As a class, we had collective of 8.8 lbs of waste! 

6.6 lb was organic waste, uneaten lunches and wasted food! 

We went through our categories of waste, weighed it and then sorted it - was it all complete used? Or was it wasted? This was a chance for use to really see our impact regarding waste, and brainstorm ways to reduce it. 

Plastic - was almost all used. Some items could be washed & reused for paint cups (fruit cups). 

Paper - There was tons of paper with one side blank, or still usable in our paper waste! We created a scrap paper bin, where one sided paper can go and be used for drawing or math. 

Foil - was almost all used. We could reuse some foil container from take out food once or twice more. 

Organic - This was where we saw the biggest difference. Out of 6.6lbs of waste, only 1.4lbs was waste that was completely used. There was lots of unfinished apples and sandwiches (which led to the "if you don't like it, take it home! This way your parents know!" conversation). 

We can reduce our organic waste by creating a compost for banana peels, apple cores, etc.

Social 3 

Students took an in depth look at life in India this week, and discussed how environment affects the way of life for people in a community. We discussed the various types of geographical landforms, and climate. Next we will be looking into the environment and regions of India. 

India day is next Friday!