Monday, November 16th, 2015

Good Afternoon Everyone,

This morning we did some Words Their Way work and all students were given a check up on their word patterns.  Others had theirs completed with Mrs. Peterson.  New word patterns have been given to most students and you should find a copy of these words in their homework pouches.  Please remember that these have been sent home for a quick nightly review and for use on spellingcity.com. If your child does not have their words yet, they will receive them by Wednesday.

While this was going on, the other students were working on various Daily 5 activities.  They were given a special tracking sheet today where they will mark down which activities they complete each day.  This will assist them in making their choices as they will be able to see which activities they tend to gravitate to and which ones they need to choose more often.

After our read aloud and movement break, we went to room 79 to watch a video to kickstart the next part of our Social Studies Inquiry.  The video goes along with a book called If the World Were a Village.  In this video/book, the world has been shrunk to a village of 100 people.  Comparisons are made regarding foods eaten, languages spoken, money earned, access to education, etc.  This will spark our questions moving forward as the students investigate these statistics and issues in greater detail.

This afternoon we were busy and moving from one activity to the next.  Mrs. Bowles was a little disorganized as her computer needed to be fixed and it ended up taking all day.  This really caused Mrs. Bowles to be a little frustrated and didn't know where anything was.

In math, we finished our Pattern Show What You with Patterns.  Mr. Demman and Mrs. Bowles had the opportunity to work with the rest of the grade three students on sharing what they know about numbers.  We will finish with the grade fours tomorrow.  Students also got some opportunity to work on their addition facts.  They used: computers, iPads, and cards to practice their facts.

We were introduced to our new Science Inquiry today.  We first viewed a video about an unmanned mission to Mars.  Then we watched the movie trailer to the movie "The Martian."  This was where Mrs. Bowles and Mrs. Quilley shared with us that we have been stranded on the planet Mars and they told us our inquiry would be about how will we be able to survive on this planet.  We worked in small groups to share what we already know about Mars.

We had to pack up quickly and head off to gym.  We warmed up with some Rock, Paper, Scissors Tag.  Then we played "Ships Ahoy."  This is a great game to help us build up our cooperation strategies.  We also worked on our throwing skills, dodging skills, and we even are getting some rock hard abs as we had to do sit-ups when our ship sank.

When we returned to the class, we brainstormed some more questions for Mrs. Kuca. She is a paleontologist and is going to be our guest speaker on dinosaurs and our other science inquiry.

We barely had time to clean up and get out the door.  My how time  flies when you are learning!



1.)  No School this Friday - Non-Instructional Day
2.)  Please dress for the weather - also add names to your clothes as we have a tonne of clothes in the Lost and Found again.
3.)  Go on Mathletics - there is some new activities posted.
4.) Families Helping Families - we sent the lists home last week.  Please email Mrs. Bowles tabowles@cbe.ab.ca or Mrs. Zwack  ajzwack@cbe.ab.ca if you would like to donate and we will send out a weekly email with a list of all of the items we have so far.



What do you think we will have to investigate further about Mars to come up with a plan of how we can survive on the planet?