Wednesday, January 13

Wow!  We started today off with a fantastic class discussion about Zabby's idea to collect items for the Syrian refugees coming to Calgary.  Our students are developing their thinking skills to become true global citizens!  We started talking about why the refugees are leaving their country and the hardships they have endured.  As the conversation progressed we got into the idea that people have different opinions about this topic in Canada and around the world.

We discussed that it was OK to disagree, but that we need to learn to be respectful and listen to what others have to say.  Together we came up with some ideas about the question:  Should Canada accept refugees from Syria?  The depth of their thinking was amazing and we are so proud of how our students can reason out the possibilities for both the agree and the disagree opinions.  We followed up with some writing in our Writer's Notebooks to share our thinking.  We encourage you and your families to carry on this discussions at home and to encourage your child to share their opinions with you.  We will continue to explore the refugees and how we might welcome them to our own city. Please check out the link below if you are interested in learning more as a family:


http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/refugees/welcome/

Our afternoon was very interesting. We really worked our growth mindset.  Today we learned a new addition game called Race to 100.   This will be a game that we can play both with Math By Myself and Math With Someone.  In this game we are working on two digit by one digit addition.  We looked at strategies to be able to do this using mental math.  We also looked at a math problem.  To break the problem down we made a chart that said  I Noticed and I Wonder. This allows us to see what information we have from the problem and what we need to find out. In this problem we had to see the pattern first in the chart and then we had to add up seven, 2-digit numbers.  When left on your own we came up with some great strategies.  We will continue our work on adding 2 - digit numbers tomorrow.

During our science inquiry, we worked on our own.  First we looked at a news article about Mars. Please click on the link below to view a 360º View of Mars from a Mars rover, Curiosity.  The question of the day will be about looking at this as well. Don't forget you can make the image move using your arrow keys on the computer.

http://globalnews.ca/news/2448889/amazing-360-degree-view-lets-you-stand-on-mars-like-mark-watney-from-the-martian/

We also tried to upload some of our videos and goals to IRIS. Due to a number of technical difficulties we didn't get very far with this.

In dance, we worked on a routine that helped out core.  We did have some difficulty following directions and thought that it was a race but it really wasn't.  I think we will do much better at this next week.... right?

1.)  Fun Lunch orders due January 19th.
2.)  Report Cards go home on Friday



Go back and view the 360º View of Mars.  Write down one thing that you noticed and one thing that you wonder.