Wednesday, December 9th, 2015

Hello Everyone,

This morning was a busy one and we all worked our best through it!  We started with a round of Daily 5 to get ourselves on track.  Mrs. Zwack and Mr. Demman are trying to get to everyone as often as possible during the busy schedule of Jeff Stockton and the many concerts we have been taking part in.

Next we were off to Jeff Stockton with all of the grade 3/4's in the hub.  We broke off into our small rehearsal groups and then had time to practice our storytelling.  Our focus is now on using our voices and our faces and our bodies to help tell the story!

Mrs. Zwack suggests that all student go into the bathroom at home and practice in front of the big mirror.  That way, you can try out different voices for the characters, add in some facial expressions and experiment with different movements.  After some practice time, have your family act as an audience (or your pets, or dolls, or stuffies) and pretend that you are doing your actual performance!  Did you know that if you practice every time as though it is performance day, your muscle memory will kick in and you will be setting strong brain pathways for the night of the performance?  

After snack and read aloud, we reviewed our Growth Mindset-Fixed Mindset sorting activity that we had started last week.  We worked together to decide which statements went in which category.  Our students are getting very good at knowing the difference between the two and that our thinking can determine much of our success!  We will keep the poster up in our room for reference throughout the year.

This afternoon was so full of learning and experiencing I am sure that we are all still vibrating.

We started off with math.  We finally got a whole hour in today, which was awesome!

In Mrs. Bowles' group we finished our investigation on the 12 Days of Christmas.  Mrs. Bowles' lost the pictures that she had taken of our patterns that we had built.  So we needed to use another strategy to help us find out how many gifts True Love gave to Me.  We looked at the chart that we had started and identified the pattern and from finding that pattern we were able to complete the chart and find out how many gifts.  We also had to use some mental math and addition strategies to help us finish the increasing pattern of all the gifts.   We found out that "Me" received a total of 364 gifts.  We also decided that that was a lot of gifts and many of them were birds, which meant there would be a lot of bird droppings.

After our Nutrition Break we had a session with Mr. Jeff Stockton.  Today we worked on our presentation volume.  Please share with your families the difference levels of volume you have and need to be a storyteller.

We were honoured to be invited to the Grade 1/2 Hope/Harmony Dress Rehearsal.  It was called Christmas at the OK Corral.  It was cute, funny and we even learned a lesson for the season.

We finished off our afternoon by working on our Science Inquiry Scripts.  We hope to get them done soon so that we can make our videos and share them with you on IRIS.

As you can see we have been very busy and still involved in the holiday season.

Things to Remember:
1.)  Non -perishable food for the food bank
2.)  Practice your storytelling
3.) Mathletics - we have pattern activities for you
4.) Do something kind for someone else - see if they notice

Question of the Day:

How are you feeling about the busyness of this time of year?  Can you share a strategy to keep your focus at school?