Skating Week!

Skating was so much fun this week! The students really enjoyed getting out on the ice, and for some it was a first time skating in a long time! Our next week of skating will be Feb 14 - 17. 

In Language Arts this week, we have been doing lots of reading comprehension. I have been working with students in small groups to assess understanding of sequence and recalling of information they have read. 

Our spelling focus this week is on digraphs (ch, tch, sh, th) and where they can be found in a word. A digraph is where two (or more) letters make one sound. The students have been working through word sorts and their spelling sheets independently during Word Work in Daily 5. On Fridays, students complete their tests on Spelling City. 

Our grammar focus this week and when to properly use possessive pronouns. These are pronouns that show ownership of an object by a noun. 

One type of possessive pronoun stands alone, "The book is mine."

The second type comes before a noun, " That is my book."

To practice this skill, students paired up and were given a sticky with a possessive pronoun on it. Then they moved around the classroom, writing a sentence on their sticky using that pronoun and attaching it to the noun/object! 

 

In Math, we have been working through math centers and practicing our basic facts. On Monday, I have the opportunity to attend a math games-based PD and it full of fun activities! I have taken some time to work with students in small groups and teach them a game called "Betweeners". Students are given anywhere from 2-5 dice, each one representing a certain place value. In groups of three, students roll their dice, and then try to arrange their dice to be an "in between" number. This means they're not trying to be the highest or the lowest! It really has them using their problem solving skills and mathematical process of comparing numbers. 

In Science, we are continuing to discuss waste in our world and the ways human produce and process waste. As humans, waste is anything we have used and no longer need so we discard. This can then be sorted by waster, recyclable, waste and compost. 

Students have learned that we recycle 4 different categories; paper, plastic, aluminum and glass. We also compost our organic waste in two possible ways - bin/pile or worm compost (vermiculture!). 

In Social, we are digging deeper into our Natural Resources and how they make our province and its regions unique. They are able to identify the raw materials resources come from and where they can be found in our province. 

Please make sure to check Powerschool for upcoming field trip permission forms! We have a lot going on in Feburary! 

Hello Parents!
Just a few reminders about February! It's going to be a busy busy month!

Wednesday, February 1 – Winter Walk
Once again, Robina Baker Elementary School is participating in this school-wide event by going on a wonderful wintery walk in Devon’s trail system. Grades 1-4 will depart the school at 12:45pm, walk for approx. 45mins before returning to school for some Hot Chocolate generously provided by The Town of Devon.

Wednesday, February 8 – Pancake Day
The Grade 4s will be participating in the Pancake Day at Riverview Middle School (RMS) as a part of our transition to Grade 5 Plan.  At 9 am all three Grade 4 classes will go to RMS (about a 5 minute walk) for a free pancake breakfast.  After the yummy breakfast provided by RMS, the students will get a tour of the school and then they will walk back to Robina Baker.

Monday, February 13 – Ski Trip
Monday, March 6 – Ski Trip
The Grade Four classes will be going skiing twice this year. This first trip is February 13 with the second one occurring on March 6.  For both trips we will leave the school promptly at 8:40 am and arrive back at the school at 4:00 pm. If your student normally takes the bus home they will need an alternate ride home from the school that day. 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 (ski pants are a must).

**We will need volunteers on and off the hill for this trip. Please let me know if you are interested.

Tuesday, February 28 – Edmonton Waste Management Centre
The Grade Four classes will be going to the Edmonton Waste Management Centre.   We will leave the school promptly at 8:30 am and arrive back at the school at 12:30 pm.  Students will tour the EWMC facility which ties into the Science 4 curriculum of Waste and Our World.

**I will be looking at the survey from the beginning of the year to contact those who expressed interest in coming on this trip.

It has been a wonderful week for weather! It's been so nice to get our outdoor recess' back!

Quick Reminders: 

Skating starts on Monday! Please ensure your child comes prepared with appropriate equipment!
Our skating schedule can be found on the Calendar tab of this blog.  

Skiing! Our Ski Dates for Rabbit Hill will be Monday, February 13th and Monday, March 7th. More details on pricing will come closer to the date. 

This Week ...

 In Language Arts this week, our reading focus was to recognize that stories and writing follows a sequential order. We have worked on sequence in our personal writing, through our How To projects, so they did really great with this! 

Writing this week, our focus on KidBlog was to start creating multiple paragraphs. When working on our Talk About it Tuesday this week, students expressed their opinion on which fictional school they would rather attend - Hogwarts or Bailey Elementary - based on books we have read aloud as a class. Students then worked with the O.R.E.O format to state their opinion, give valid reasons and add an explanation or example as to why their reason is valid. With this idea, students created multi-paragraph writing, with each paragraph having their own topic the supported their overall main opinion. 

Here are some examples of student's work. 

We also started spelling this week! On the side of our blog there will be updates of our grammar and spelling focus. 

In Math this week, we have continued with our focus on Subtraction problems. We are reinforcing and practicing basic math skills to help us with borrowing and subtracting large numbers. 

Students are encouraged to play games or use Mathletics to practice their basic facts at home. 

In Social, the students are wrapping up their chapter and studying of the 6 Geographical Regions of Alberta. As a class, once students had presented their projects last week, we created study notes. This was an opportunity for students to build strong note-taking skills. We practiced basic studying strategies to help us prepare for our Regions quiz. 

As a class, we reviewed our notes, determining what we thought was important information on a region. Afterwards, the students separated into their houses to play a quick quiz game to see what they could remember. Then came the quiz. 

In Science, we started discussing - What is Waste? What types of Waste are there? and What do we do with it?

Students were asked to brainstorm all the types of waste they could think of and put it on a sticky, and then on the board. 

As a group, we sorted the waste into 3 different categories. I then put those stickies on paper and asked the students to try and come up with a rule for all the types of waste on their page. 

The rules they came up with were "Reusable Waste", "Non-Reusable Waste" and "Compost".

Through reading, we now know, there are various types of waste, and we would rename these groups: Recyclable, Organic (biodegradable) and Garbage(Solid/Liquid/Hazardous).  

Have a great weekend everyone!

Welcome Back!

Welcome back! I hope everyone had an awesome time over the break!

Heads up! Our skating schedule has been finalized! Please click here to view our skating times Jan 23-26.

To participate in skating, all students need to wear CSA approved helmets (i.e. hockey helmets - students will need full cages if they would like to play shinny, downhill skiing helmets, horseback riding helmets, BUT absolutely NO BIKE HELMETS. 

Our school does have skates and helmets available to be borrowed by students should they not have skates that fit or a helmet meeting the CSA requirement. 

JACKETS ON! Please remind your child they must wear their outdoor jackets while skating. Gloves are also required (they keep fingers warm and offer protection!) Ski pants are encouraged.

We are in need of one off-ice supervisor to join us. If you are able to come to one or more of the dates/times please let me know ASAP. It will be a first come first serve basis.

As a way to share about our holiday break, we started a fun activity - TWEETS!
Students used a graphic organizer to organize their memories from their break in sequence. Then through peer editing, students read each other's worked and checkedfor grammar errors, spelling, capitalization of proper nouns and proper use of punctuation.

Once they had them planned, students worked with a template within google slides to create their own Twitter pages (these are not real pages online). They did a great job with this and are becoming quite the tech savvy bunch!!

In Math, we began talking about subtraction of numbers up to 10, 000. We worked with base ten blocks and manipulatives to solve subtraction problems, eventually working borrowing tens into our lessons as well. Some students are still working to understand this process and are encouraged to practice at home on Mathletics.

In Science, we started discussing our new unit - Waste and our World. A main focus for the next few weeks will be what waste is, how humans create waste and how we can reduce/improve our biological footprints.

In Social, we have been finishing and presenting our Alberta's Regions Projects. Students have been working on these since before the break and have been doing a great job presenting.

In Art, we did a guided drawing of a snowman! They turned out so unique and cute!

 


Reminder's for next week:

Jan 18 is Beach Day - Dress in your fun beach wear, keeping it school appropriate!

Happy Christmas!

We have had one action-packed-fun-filled week!

We started off with discovering about our last objective in Wheels & Levers - Predicting how the change of position of the fulcrum will affect the effort involved.
To demonstrate this, we created a giant lever, identified where the effort, load and fulcrum were and tested out lifting students! I acted as the effort and we moved the fulcrum from middle, to closer to the load or closer to the effort. The students discovered it was easier to lift the load when the fulcrum is placed closer to the load. Then each student had a chance to act as the effort as I was the load! Mrs. Kloschinsky even got in on the fun!

To see all the pictures from our experiment click here.

On Friday morning we were engineers! Students planned, tested and improved marshmallow launching catapaults! Emma and Mackenzie had the most accurate catapault!

In Social, the students have been working diligently on their regions slides projects. They will have one more day when we return from break to tune them up and then they will present their regions to the class.

In Math, we wrote a mid-unit test on Number Sense. Everyone did pretty great! Some of the areas we tested on were number value, place value, expanded form and adding with regrouping.

In Language Arts, we continued to work on our procedural writing structure through Daily 5 activities and on our chromebooks.

We we extremely lucky this week to have Mr. Maltais come in and take us through a Breakout adventure! Students were in groups of 6 - 7 and were given a box with 6 locks.
Through teamwork, cooperation, critical thinking and using their problem solving skills they had to solve clues to unlock the box! Everyone got their boxes open, even if it was over the 45 minute time limit! It was really great to see them working together and thinking outside the box. Ask your chld about it, they seemed to have a blast!

Thursday we had our Harry Potter Party! This was in lieu of a Christmas Party this year, as we had finished the first book and wanted to take time to watch the movie and compare differences. WHAT A FUN DAY WE HAD!
We started off the morning in gym playing our own version of - Quidditch! Students had to pass around a quaffle and try and shoot it into hoops on the wall, all the while, beaters on the sidelines are throwing bludgers at them!












Next we came back to the classroom and completed a couple of different activities, including wand making! Using chopsticks and hot glue each student made their own custom wand! Each student added their own personal flare and design.

 
Next they chose their own colours to paint them!

Thanks to Mrs. DeGray who made some amazing Snitch Cake Pops!!!!

Happy Holidays!

One More Week!

What a week! I can't believe Christmas is just around the corner! Let's hope some warmer weather comes our way.

We have been focusing on different types of nouns over the past couple of weeks in grammar. We discussed irregular plural nouns - those nouns that don't follow our plural nouns rules, such as: feet, teeth, mice or children. Students also have been discussing our various pronouns, identifying them in their reading and writing, as well as knowing when to use a subject or object pronoun. 

Our writing focus this week was procedural writing. When we are writing there needs to be organization and our writing needs to follow a sequential order. This week, students have been writing "How To" pieces. 

We started with the process of how to write a How To! 

First, we need to pick a topic. 

Next, we need to make a plan and list all the steps to the topic (being very specific). 

Then, we take our steps and determine importance! Can we put more than one simple step together to create a compound sentence?

After, we start writing!

As a class, we thought out all the steps on how to plan a party and students drew images to represent each step. Afterwards, we grouped steps together and students wrote how to plan a party.

Students practiced this skill with "How To Make [Their Favourite Sandwich]." After they had chosen their sandwich, they wrote out all the steps and then did their final writing in google drawings. Here are some examples. 

In Math, the students have been working on regrouping using place value and how that relates when we're adding 2, 3, and 4 digit numbers. 

We started off by using visuals and representing addition problems with base ten blocks. This helped the students see - why do we carry that one?! 

Throughout the week we reinforced this concept with practice from our textbooks, in pairs and with various math games. 

We will be having a unit test next week on what we have covered so far in Number Sense. 

Tololwa Mollel is a local author who came and visited our school on Tuesday. He is an author from Tanzania and has written various children's stories. He orally told one of his stories to the students, as well as, having some students come up and do readings from his story A Promise to the Sun. To learn more about this Author, click here. 

In Social, to wrap up Chapters 1- 3 students are working on their regions projects. They are in groups of 4 - 5 and are researching the 6 regions. They will work together to put their information into slides reports and share with the class. 

To review some of the main vocabulary terms from our social chapters we worked with Quizlet! Quizlet is an online vocabulary student site, where students can create/study flashcards and then test themselves on their vocabulary through interactive games. We tried out quizlet live and it was a hit! The students are separated into animal groups - which they have to talk to each other and find out who is in their group - and then compete against each other in teams to find the term - definition answers! Its complicated to explain but so great! It has the students verbally discussing the meaning of terms. 

Next week is our last week before the holidays!
On Thursday, we are going to have our Harry Potter Wrap up Party in the afternoon. 
We will be watching the first movie (Since we have finished the book) and enjoying some snacks! So far I have had lots of offers to bring in food, we have:
- Chips (TM)
- Cookies (CA)
- Sugar Cookies (EM)
- Juice Boxes (HK)

On Friday, in the morning we are going to have a Recycled Christmas Gift Exchange!

In your home, there are probably many items that your child no longer plays with but are still very good toys, or even books they are no longer reading and would love to pass on! Please have your child wrap an item and bring it to school any time next week, and on Friday morning we will have a White Elephant type gift exchange! 

Thank you and have a great weekend!!!

Just a Few Reminders... 
- Holiday Paint Day is this Sunday, if you bought tickets! 
- Christmas Concert is on Tuesday! Performances are at 1:10 pm & 6 pm. 
- Early Dismissal is on Wednesday, Dec 7th. 
- Last day to donate for Christmas Elves is on Friday. 

This week was a busy week with our Christmas concert rehearsals! Our class has been working really hard on their two songs and it really shows, they are doing great! We can't wait to show everyone on Tuesday Night.

Our reading focus this week was to continue to find the main idea in not only one paragraph, but an entire article or piece of writing. In KidBlog, the students read a report on Egypt and worked on determing the main idea and which sentences supported this idea.

We also took time to look at the different way we pluralize nouns, and which word endings change when the word becomes plural. To practice we played a game in teams where students were shown an word and hard to try and write the plural form. They rocked at this! One that tricks us a bit is words that end in "f" or "fe", the f changes to a v and we add es.
Shelf = Shelves
Calf = Calves

We tested our knowledge of simple and compound sentences with a Kahoot! This is a really fun and interactive way to do a quick check and see how students are understanding concepts.

Students continued to work on writing compound sentences within their own writing through Work on Writing. Using given topics, they wrote their own paragraphs using conjunctions to combine simple sentences.

We were so lucky to get to participate in a Google Mystery Hangout today!!! This is when we video call another school somewhere in the world and play 20 questions!! Asking only yes or no questions (and their knowledge of mapping skills) the students narrow down where our callers are from! Today we met a fourth grade class from Green Bay, Wisconsin!

In Science we are winding down our Wheels & Levers unit. Students worked with gears and explored how to use a driver gear and vertical gear systems in small groups. 

Have a great weekend!!!