Happy Monday Everyone!

The students arrived eager and ready to learn this morning.  We started the day with Daily 5 and painting the backgrounds for our India pages in our Visual Journals.  As we read follow the Elephant, we are collecting interesting facts about the country of India to add to our pages.  As well, we redid our Words Their Way overall assessment to check for growth and groups will be rearranged for next week.  If students require more time at the level they are at, they will be given that opportunity.

After Read Aloud and a quick movement break, we set to work reviewing our Growth Mindset and Fixed Mindset activities.  We are working on a Visual Journal page to show what we have already learned and will then move into some goal setting on Iris.  Report Cards come home this week and we remind parents to review the comments with their children.  We have set out to celebrate their accomplishments as well as to point our areas for future growth.  Framing it this way is to show that although they may not be able to do something "yet", it is within their grasp moving into the months ahead.  We discussed this together this morning and the students seem to have a good understanding.

Please remember to have your child accessing Raz Kids at home.  Everyone has had a chance to log in at school and to try out the level set for them.  It would be great if you could monitor one of their sessions to see how they are doing with this level.  If you find it is much too difficult or too easy, please e-mail and let me know.  The students have been asked to complete the comprehension questions to "Check for Understanding" and to "Go Back and Reread" if they make any errors to ensure that they learned something from the reading.  There are extra activities that you can print off if you wish them to do a bit more with the story.  All passwords are the child's first initial and last name.  There class is under azwack.

This afternoon in math we finally started getting our math fact goals written and we are beginning to get them onto IRIS.  Students also started adding their Mars videos on IRIS. Please check out your child's work. From this work we will move our learning forward. Goals are important for learning.

In our science inquiry about Mars we are really beginning to get down to business.  We broke into our two groups. We are starting to brainstorm ideas of what we need to continue with our investigations on building a shelter as well as how are we going to grow plants.  We also looked at questions we need answered from the other group so that we can proceed with our planning.  For example:  The structural engineers have decided that we need to have heat in our structure. We need to ask the meteorologists what the temperature on Mars is.  How cold can it get so that we can plan our structure properly.

In gym, we broke into stations and worked on the following skills:  passing and receiving, shooting accuracy, and puck control.

We finished off our day trying to get our videos uploaded into IRIS and the backgrounds onto our green screen.  We can get rather frustrated with technology.


1.) Fun Lunch Order due by January 19th
2.) Library books must be brought back if they are overdue

What do you think will be the biggest challenge in your Mars science inquiry?