Monday, May 16

This morning we began with a review of our class meeting from Friday.  Students were asked to think over the weekend of the thing they could do to help our classroom to be a peaceful place of learning for the last 6 weeks of school. The students were very perceptive to what needed improving and they were making plan to work on it.

We then moved on to Daily 5 and students were very focused and on their jobs!  We checked in on our Read to Self books and many students are making progress on their self selected "good fit" books. Our Read aloud of the novel Pax is getting very exciting and the students are making many connections to their own experiences and other books we have read.  The connection between Peter and his fox is very deep and it is interesting to follow their journeys to reunite!

We ended the morning with French with Mrs. Kenna teaching us the days of the week and the French words  for "before"  and "after."  We appreciated the students active participation in the lesson!

This afternoon was filled with activity.  In math, we continued our work on fractions.  Today we investigated fractions of a whole.  We created quilts using coloured tiles.  We started with 16 tiles. From there we identified the fractions of the colours. Then we rearranged the tiles and found equivalent fractions. For example, if we had 8/16 of our quilt red, when we rearranged the tiles we found that half or 1/2 of the quilt was red.

In our science inquiry we did some initial research on wind turbines.  We got a basic understanding of how they work.  While we watched a few short videos about wind turbines we were asked to relate what we learned to the different environment on Mars. We brainstormed a few of the problems that we could foresee occurring. We will continue this work tomorrow and break into smaller groups of scientists and engineers who will take some of these concerns in creating a prototype for their turbine for Mars.

In gym , we had the whole gym to ourselves.  We started our lesson off with  Rock, Paper, Scissors Tag.   We then worked on our teamwork during a relay game.  The object of the game what to run and retrieve red cups, do 10 jumping jacks and build a tower.  Then we looked at our target skills. We played a game called 21.  We had three different shooting lines and had to throw a beanbag into a hoop. We finished up with a game called Protect the Cone.



1.)  Please return all forms signed:  Soccer and Astrodome
2.) Spring Dance ticket orders are going fast get yours in if you would like to attend.
3.)  Volunteer Tea this Thursday
4.)  Check out Friday's blog for information on Trout release and EcoClub festivities.
We have learned that if a fraction has the same number as the numerator and the denominator that it equals one whole.  So if you ate 4 slices of a cake that was divided into 4 pieces you ate the whole thing.  This is called a proper fraction.  What do you think it would mean if you saw a fraction that looked like this  5/4?