March 12, 2024

Wow, does time ever fly! Spring break is days away and it is finally feeling like the weather is warming up. Here's to hoping we all stay healthy and germ free for the next while!

Thanks for your patience with updates. It has been such a busy couple of weeks between Student Led conferences, Family Day and report cards to name a few. 

Here's what we've been up to lately:

Writing:

We finally finished our "how to" paragraphs on building a snowman. We learned about transition words and experimented with a new introduction - using Onomatopoeia (which Ms. Tan has trouble saying!)  Throughout the writing of this assignment, the class was shown a model and were then provided with a structure for each sentence. During these mini-lessons, we talked about starting our sentences off differently and using adjectives in our writing. When we finished our drafts, we went back and extended sentences and then went onto editing. The class finished their good copies today and we are super excited to FINALLY put all our "penguins" together to create a 3D model of a few pieces of our winter writing. (Maybe this is why it finally feels like spring - because we stopped writing about winter?!)

Last week, we also began a new writing assignment. We are going to write a story about a Super Hero! Each student picked a hero (an animal), a super power and a villain (another animal). We then named our heros and started to look at character traits. After the break, we will continue to plan for our story before diving into writing. Again, the focus will be on making sure we extend our sentences to include enough details, adding adjectives, beginning our sentences differently and writing an introduction and conclusion. We will also begin to look into dialogue and making sure we include story elements - setting and problem and solution. 

In Math, most of us have nearly finished our front end addition. We have all practiced adding numbers into the the thousands. Some students could use additional practice as their understanding is not quite solidly there. We began looking at subtracting numbers with and without regrouping and will continue to practice after the break. Many students have received small group/1:1 support with these concepts! 

The class will continue to revisit our learning of decimals and fractions and the concept of multiplication. Ms. O'Gorman has begun teaching them strategies for practicing multiplication facts as many students have finished their Mad Minute addition facts. 

This last month, we finished up our Cardboard Arcades. Many groups decided to build a "maze" and were very excited to build them. Most groups were very focused and enjoyed the task. We can't wait to try them out soon. 

In Socials, we examined a number of locations in Canada and talked about their landscape, economic activities, climate, and vegetation. So far, we have examined the Appalachian Mountains, the Artic Lowlands and the Canadian Shield. We also continued to read about various Indigenous groups around Canada and have been learning about their location and housing, lifestyle and diets. 

Going to end here and hit publish for another month rolls by. Wishing everyone a relaxing, enjoyable and safe spring break! 

IT

February 1, 2024

Hi everyone,

It has been a jam packed week so far! Valentine lists went home earlier in the week - please check for them in student planners, I've noticed a few still stuck in there. 

We have noticed the class has started to become a bit more unfocused as of late. This week, we talked quite a lot about taking care of our own learning, minding our own business and how to pay attention. Today, I told them that although they have lovely hair, I want to see their eyes, not the tops of their heads! We also talked about the reason behind the rules at school and in the classroom - they are there to keep you safe AND to help you learn. We care deeply about each student and their learning and it is the teacher's job to make sure you make progress. As students, we might not always enjoy or feel happy with what we are learning and/ or love it when the teacher is "bugging" us, but in the end, it always comes back to adults caring about us and wanting us to be our best. 

Respect has been another topic of conversation that has been another topic of conversation we have had with the class. Respect towards each other by not minding each other's business and not accusing people of things we have not personally seen are two topics we have addressed. We have also talked about respect towards adults in the school and not talking back when we have been asked to do something. We always have a right to ask why or to feel however they feel, but we can all ask and respond in respectful ways. It can sometimes be extremely tough, especially when we are tired, hungry or in grade 3 and 4! Ms. O'Gorman and I believe this is something the students know and will do their best to improve on. 

In writing this week, we finished our concluding sentence about winter, our editing and are well into our good copies. You will get to read them when you come in for student led conferences on Tuesday or Thursday (please sign up ASAP, if you have trouble, email us!) We have a number of other paragraphs to complete before our "penguins" are finished, but the class has made a lovely start.

In reading today, we talked about the strategies we have learned to date that help us better understand what we read. We talked about how Ms. Tan sometimes *gasp* word reads to her children at bedtime and has no idea what she's read! We agreed that this was no good and that we need to understand what we read. Some strategies that we have worked on so far are making connections, visualizing (making a movie in your head). We are now adding questioning to our bank of tools. We read the story "The Boy Who Loved Words" and brainstormed questions around the text. Next week, we are going to look at the difference between "quick thinking" and "deep thinking" questions as I told them that they are grade 3's and 4's and need to be asking questions that will deepen their understanding of what they read. While we were reading, we also took notice to the many wonderful adjectives that the author included. They truly make the words come alive and hopefully, we are inspired to include more when we complete our homework!

In Math this week, we continued practicing our "mad minutes". Each student is practicing their addition facts. They record their start and end times and practice a number of questions. Each time they practice, they are practicing all +2 until they can complete the questions accurately and in a reasonable amount of time (3-4 mins). Once they are able to do so, they move onto the next number (+3, +4, etc). We have a few students who have worked their way up to +9 and are beginning/ begun to practice their multiplication facts. Once they finish their Mad Minute, they each have mental math to complete. These are questions that are more challenging and require some strategy. This week, we talked about using benchmark numbers to help us:

45 + 8 + 55 ---> note the two 5's in the units place value and add them together. Then we notice that 45 + 55 = 100. 100 is a lovely benchmark number because anything added to it is easy! Hence this equals 108. 

On Tuesday, we reviewed the concept of multiplication. We practiced building it by using paper circles and counters to represent an equation we rolled with an 8-10 sided dice. For example: 

We rolled 8 and 7, we would:

1. Draw a picture: of 8 circles with 7 dots in each

2. Write a repeated addition equation: 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 + 7 

3. Write a groups of sentence: 8 groups of 7 

4. Include a multiplication sentence: 8X7

5. Make a story: There were 8 tents with 7 people in each tent

Some students had a hard time wrapping their minds around the story so this will be a concept we will be revisiting in a variety of ways over the next few months.

Yesterday and today, we practiced building, identifying, reading and connecting fractions and decimals. We talked about what the numerator and denominator are in a fraction and used base ten blocks to build decimals such as 0.1, 0.5, 0.18 and 0.13.. Once most of the class was starting to feel comfortable with the representations, we broke into groups of 4 and I gave them either a fraction, the words, a picture or a decimal to represent all the ways we learned. This again is a concept that is proving to be a challenging for a number of students and will be something we will continue to explore. I am hoping that next week, students will be comfortable enough to start to independently practice representing fractions and decimals. 

In other news, there have been quite a number of challenges on the playground recently. Students are coming back after recess complaining of unkind words, rough play and sometimes rules being changed or added mid-game. Last week, Ms. O'Gorman talked to the class about anger mountain, taking responsibility for our actions and how we have all learned strategies to try to calm down before it escalates and we make poor choices. Walking away, taking deep breaths, reading a book, going to get a drink of water are all great examples of ways to calm down. We also talked about how we can only control ourselves and that we need to make good choices which can sometimes mean walking away from our friends if they are choosing to do things we don't feel comfortable with. 

One way we are thinking of addressing some of the playground issues outside is having students who are having concerns write down what they experienced and how they felt about it. We will have a class discussion about using "I" statements rather than writing accusatorial statements. Once they finish writing, they will share their messages with each other and we are hoping to send both versions home so that families can reinforce what students can do in the future, when they are met with similar situations. We hope this helps students realize there are two sides to each story and that we need to be safe, respectful, responsible AND understanding!

Have a nice evening and TGIF in advance! :) 

January 27, 2024

A very belated happy new year to all!  Sorry for the lack of updates lately - between illnesses, snow days and short weeks, it's been a bit of a month!

We had a fantastic time at the skating rink - thank you to all the volunteers who helped drive, tie and untie laces and fit helmets.  Both classes displayed great respect and kindness to each other and we were very proud of them.

In language arts, we have been looking at visualizing and how we make movies in our minds to help us better understand what we read. We are also going to begin questioning and examining how we can ask deep thinking vs. quick thinking questions to deepen our understanding of texts. 

In Writing, we finished up our holiday traditions by talking about what conclusions are and how most writing should not be left as cliff hangers. Ms Tan shared that she nearly threw a fit when one of the books she read over the holidays ended just as they were about to reveal the mystery! Afterwards, we practiced our editing skills and did our good copies. This past week, we nearly completed our drafts of our paragraphs about Winter. We reviewed what an introduction is and tried out using dialogue as a hook. We wrote three sentences about winter and practiced applying our understanding of extending sentences to them. We are now also going to be expecting students to be more conscious of their word choice and to practice using adjectives and adverbs in their writing. As you might have noticed, this is now an additional layer to their homework. Quite a few students missed this piece- if you could, please remind them to read the instructions carefully.

In Math, we have been working on rounding and are beginning to learn about fractions and decimals. We have also continued to practice adding with 3 to 4 digit numbers with and without regrouping. Some students have been practicing through individual 1:1 practice and/or small groups as they are having a hard time understanding the process. One strategy for helping to better understand what we are learning is to have them build the numbers they are adding with base ten blocks. It helps them also see strategies such as adding nice round numbers like 90 to numbers that aren't so easy to work with, such as 13. For example: 

145

  + 286

add hundreds     300

add tens     120

add ones +    11

add hundreds     400 

add tens 30

add ones +        1 

                          431

As you can see, we begin with the largest place value and then work our way backwards. We continue until we break it down to the easiest round numbers in each place value. When you say, "400 AND 30 AND 1" you can nearly hear the sum, 431.

Last week, we also had a visit from Nathan Wilson, our district Indigenous teacher. He shared with us the difference between a traditional welcome and land acknowledgement. We learned that a traditional welcome can only be given by people who are Indigenous to the land while anyone can give a land acknowledgement. We also talked briefly about truth and reconciliation and how this is something that is ongoing. 

Two weeks ago, we learned that we are going to make a cardboard arcade with all the cardboard we have been bringing in. The inspiration comes from a boy named Caine. You can watch the video we viewed here. On Tuesday, we also got to start learning how to construct cardboard connectors. Each team tried to make as many connectors as they could. We tried out notch connectors, tabs, slot xs, external inserts, etc. We figured out how the thick cardboard was rather challenging to cut so some teams might be on the hunt for some thinner pieces once they design their arcade. 

If you haven't had a chance to check out the pictures we've posted , they are all on Instagram. The link is above, to the right. 

Lastly, a few upcoming things:

• Valentine's day class list will be coming home this week

• Please ask your child to review their previously marked homework - this might have some feedback on there to help with the following week

• Student led conferences are coming up, please make sure you sign up!

• Scholastic order will be placed at the end of this coming week. Please make sure you place your order soon if you are hoping to do so. 

Have a great evening!

IT

Dec 5, 2023

Hi all!

Sorry about the lack of posts in the past few weeks. It's that time of year of holiday cheer, colds and reports! 

A few housekeeping items:

• Please check with your child to make sure they have a change of clothing and a pair of inside shoes at school.

• We are noticing there's been an increase of toys coming to school. A gentle reminder to keep these items at home or if they are at school, they need to stay in their backpacks. 

• Field trip on Thursday to Delta City Hall for the Children's Christmas Tree Program. Please send a booster if your child requires one. 

• We are looking for larger pieces of cardboard (but less than 2' X 2') , empty toilet paper/ paper towel rolls for a special project we have planned in January. These can be sent in anytime. 

In Writing, we started writing part 1 of 6 of a sampling of winter related paragraphs. Our first paragraph is a narrative about a holiday tradition. We looked at writing a topic sentence and also talked about connecting words that can be used to link to ideas in a sentence. 

In Math, we have continued to practice front end addition and patterning. We began looking at the concept of multiplication as well. We learned that Multiplication is the same as "groups of". 

For example:

Ms. Tan had 4 groups of 2 students in the classroom: 

OO OO OO OO

There are four groups of 2

2+2+2+2

2, 4, 6, 8

2X4 = 8

This proved to be a bit challenging for some students as they were also asked to come up with a short story for their multiplication equations generated from rolling a dice (they rolled a dice twice to come up with the two numbers - the multiplicand and the multiplier). 

Front end addition is also something we need to revisit in the coming weeks and likely after the break. Some students are having a hard time figuring it out as it's quite a different method from the "old" way we adults learned by carrying 1's. Here is a video explaining the process of front end addition. Another one with some visuals (although this one doesn't carry the process out to the very end like the first video, as I'm asking them to do, for now.) 

Signing off for now!

IT

Nov. 17, 2023

Hi everyone!

What a long short week it's been. We (started) and finished our good copies of our Haunted house writing. During the editing process, we noticed many students needed a good review of their capitalization rules. Today, the class worked on a practice sheet on capitalization. It looks like more focus will be needed in this area - lots of review of the rules along with making sure we are not capitalizing letters that are not supposed to be capitalized! 

In Math, we started front end addition and did some catch up on some patterning. Many students were able to successfully grasp front end addition pretty quickly and have started their independent practice of 2, 3 digit addition with and without regrouping. They will continue to practice increasingly harder problems until the grade 4's get to adding to 10 000 and the grade 3's to 1000 (minimally!) 

Some housekeeping:

Some of you may have been a bit confused with our schedule this week! I am teaching Junior Math Stretch at Delta Manor some Wednesday mornings. The program is for gifted Math students and since teaching Math is one of my most favourite things to teach, I am thrilled to be part of the program again. 

We are also noticing gaps in learning and are concerned that students are not having enough practice time at school. Some of the big areas that we are watching are:

Writing, conventions and Math facts. As such, we are planning to make some adjustments to the homework students are receiving. Unfortunately, it means that there will be a bit of an increase in what is coming home. Writing will continue as is, as will the commonly spelled word lists. We are also planning to send home some basic editing sheets to reinforce the skills we have taught and some Math fact sheet practice. In order to provide families with enough time to complete this homework, we are going to send them home on Mondays and they will be due the following Monday. The only exception will be commonly spelled words - the test will remain on the last day of the school week. 

We understand families are very busy so please do not stress about this practice. Our intention is to ensure students are armed with the skills they need to be successful as we head into more challenging curriculum. That being said, we are really wanting to teach the students time management  skills along with responsibility. We sometimes hear kids saying, "my mom/ dad didn't tell me!" or "my adult didn't pack it!" - our usual response is "Your adult isn't in our class, you are." The homework that we are sending home should not take them more than about 15 minutes to complete each night. If you are finding it's taking a lot longer, please let us know and we can make some adjustments for your child.

Have a wonderful weekend!

IT

Nov 12, 2023

Hi All,

Hope everyone had a nice weekend.  It was so nice that the rain held off for Remembrance Day. 

This past week, we basically continued with what we were working on the week before. The class is well into their official word sort groups and learning sorts according to an assessment they completed earlier in the fall. Each cycle, the routine goes as:

Day 1 - Meet with Ms. O'Gorman or Ms . Tan to learn the sort and vocabulary

Day 2 - Cut out the sort and sort it on your own.  Sort is checked by an adult (student reads words)

Day 3 - Speed sort (sort as fast as you can). Get it checked by an adult. Mix and Fix with your partner - swap three pairs of words and catch the error. 

Day 4 - Speed sort. Get it checked by an adult. Hidden sort 1 - one partner calls the words, the other points to the header it would go under. Swap roles. 

Day 5 - Speed Sort. Get it checked by an adult. Hidden sort 2 - adult calls words, student writes the words under the appropriate header in their word sort book. Get it corrected by an adult and fix any mistakes. 

Day 6 - Speed Sort. Get it checked by an adult. Travel spelling - place your words in one location in the room and your book at your desk. Read a word, leave it and write it in your book. Continue until all words are finished and get it corrected by an adult. Fix any mistakes.

Day 7 - Speed sort & glue down. 

Day 8 - Dictation (test) 

As you can see, there is a lot of practice that goes into the word sort before their actual test. After their test, their word sort books will go home to get signed and corrected. Any incorrect words need to be written out in their books 8 times each. 

This past week, we began writing our good copies of our Haunted house listings. Most students finished editing their writing - it was a good learning experience as many students started to recognize when they were unnecessarily capitalizing or that circling a word was only step one in correcting their spelling errors! The hope is that we will finish this up in the coming week so we can move onto a new writing activity! 

In Math, we worked on solving our first word problem. About two weeks ago, we wrote a problem about how we saw a variety (elephants, 3 legged capybaras and kangroos) at our Halloween parade. Each student was given a different number of feet that they saw and had to find out what they might have seen. We talked about how we could use skip counting to help us do this:

We saw 24 legs:

A) 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24 - we saw 8 three legged capybaras

B) 2, 4, 6, .... 24 - we saw 12 kangaroos

C) 4, 8, 12, ... 24 - we saw 8 elephants

D) We could also see 4 three legged capybaras (3,6,9, 12) + 2 elephants (4, 8) + 2 kangaroos (2, 4) = 12 + 8 + 4 = 24 

The problem that they are working on now is related to pattern and algebraic thinking. This proved to be quite challenging for most students and many are not quite finished. It will be something we will re-visit in the coming week. The goal is to try to write/ solve at least 2 word problems per month so that students develop problem solving strategies, learn to apply the Math concepts we are learning and to develop perseverance with challenging tasks. 

Hope everyone enjoys their last day of the weekend tomorrow!

IT 

Nov 3, 2023

TGIF! What a week! Hope everyone is staying healthy (unlike a certain beginning of the week teacher!) and had a fantastic Halloween. 

Our Remembrance Day school presentation that will be led by the grade 7's will be held on Nov. 9th. Our class will be going through the gym from 11:30-12:00. Families from Division 5 who wish to participate are invited to join us at this time.  

In literacy, we finished up the drafting process for our haunted houses. We practiced extending sentences as a class and then with partners using the 5W's. We also began the editing phase of our writing. Hoping to finish the good copies off next week! 

The class has had a few weeks of writing homework and have hopefully settled into the routine of doing this. We encourage the children to look at the feedback from what is returned to them in order to improve on their writing. We are finding that there are a few students who need to add more details to their writing as it is pretty "minimalistic". 

In Math, we worked on an increasing pattern by building, extending, charting the data and examined how it was changing in the t-chart. We looked at the changes going vertically in the chart as well as horizontally. We then noticed that the numbers were multiplying to themselves (2X2, 3X3, 4X4, etc.). From there, we realized if we knew this about the pattern (an algebraic equation), we could easily figure out the 20th term without having to calculate or build the pattern. Some of us felt super challenged with this concept, but that's ok because it's new and we will practice more. 

In Socials, we started learning about the Fur Trade. We watched a video about the Beaver Pelt Trade and started to talk about what trading meant as well as why Beaver fur was so popular and valuable. 

In HACE, we have been learning about being respectful learners, listening with attention, using self talk to help avoid distractions,  empathy and respectful and being assertive. Over the next  few weeks, a few home components to follow up on this week's lessons will go home in their homework duotangs. Please ask your child to go over what we have been learning with you! It will be a great way to review the skills we have taught. 

 We are nearly finished with reading assessments. We are hoping to start home reading for some of our readers in the next two weeks. For our more independent readers, we request that they read 15-20 mins each night. Students would also greatly benefit from continuing to listen to an adult read a book that is too challenging for them. A good "hack" I have been using borrowing audio books from the public library! The reason we encouraged continued read alouds is so students continue to build their language and communication skills, exposure to diverse ideas, themes and topics (that may also generate conversation) and train their attention span to name a few.  If you are interested in learning more, here's a great blurb from Reading Rockets: 

The Benefits of Reading Aloud

Reading aloud is the foundation for literacy development. It is the single most important activity for reading success (Bredekamp, Copple, & Neuman, 2000). It provides children with a demonstration of phrased, fluent reading (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996). It reveals the rewards of reading, and develops the listener’s interest in books and desire to be a reader (Mooney, 1990).

Listening to others read develops key understanding and skills, such as an appreciation for how a story is written and familiarity with book convetions, such as “once upon a time” and “happily ever after” (Bredekamp et al., 2000). Reading aloud demonstrates the relationship between the printed word and meaning – children understand that print tells a story or conveys information – and invites the listener into a conversation with the author.

Children can listen on a higher language level than they can read, so reading aloud makes complex ideas more accessible and exposes children to vocabulary and language patterns that are not part of everyday speech. This, in turn, helps them understand the structure of books when they read independently (Fountas & Pinnell, 1996). It exposes less able readers to the same rich and engaging books that fluent readers read on their own, and entices them to become better readers. Students of any age benefit from hearing an experienced reading of a wonderful book

Before signing off, a reminder that Friday Nov. 10th is. a district closure and Monday, Nov. 13th is a Statutory Holiday so there will be no school. That's all for now! Have a wonderful weekend! 

Oct 19, 2023

It was wonderful to touch base with most families this week and last. Thank you to all of you for being our partners in this crazy journey we call school!

This week, we dove into our Haunted House writing. We are officially responsible for selling 24 haunted homes on Dungeon Street. Each realtor is responsible for selling one house and have been busy preparing a super description for potential buyers. We learned a new strategy for "hooking" our readers (aka, writing an introduction): using a list of adjectives. We also described the living room of the home and chose three objects to describe. We started to practice using our 5W's (who/what/when/where/why) to help us extend our sentences. For example:

Version 1: The TV was haunted. (why was it haunted?)

Version 2: The TV was haunted because the goblins broke it and it started singing in the middle of the night. 

The class watched Ms. Tan think aloud as she was writing and used a number of examples before they were given the task of writing. The task was broken down sentence by sentence in order to make sure each student was applying what we were learning. Each realtor has nearly a half page of writing with some pretty fantastic words! 

Sentences of the week #1 were passed back. We haven't had a chance to go over the results with the class yet. When we do, we will go over why they are receiving the feedback, what it means and how they can use it to improve. The focus is using it to improve and not to feel frustrated with our "mark" (growth mindset!). We are hoping to see students begin to extend their sentences by using the 5Ws and to begin to look at how they begin their sentences. This is also being modelled during "think alouds" during writing lessons. 

In Math, we have been reviewing place value and are speeding along. The class has been representing numbers using base ten blocks and drawings. They also have been demonstrating that the same number can be partitioned in different ways. For example: 

24 can be 2 tens and 4 ones OR it can be 1 ten and 14 ones.

Next, we will be representing numbers in expanded form and will then begin to head into addition and subtraction of 3-4 digit numbers. 

The class has also begin moving along with Math facts. Today, they learned strategies for doubling. The plan is to move quickly through addition and subtraction so that we can begin to look at some strategies for multiplication facts. 

Pumpkin carving was a success today and the class greatly enjoyed themselves. Have a wonderful weekend! 

October 14th, 2023

Hope everyone is having a great weekend! Thank you to all families that signed up for conferences, we look forward to meeting the remainder of our families on Tuesday!

A quick reminder that our class will be carving pumpkins on Thursday. Please send in any available scoops and carving tools with names marked on them. If any of you would like to bake the seeds, please also send a labelled bag for your child.  We are carving with our buddies in Mrs. Hulmes class. Throughout the year, we will meet up with them and practice different things. It may look different from our typical older-younger buddy program as some of them are the same age as us, but it shall still be fun to learn with them! 

Last week, we sent home Sentences of the Week #2. The main goal is to have students write 3-4 complete sentences with supporting details. For example: 

Instead of: I went to Florida. I went to Disney World. I went to the beach.

Improvement: I went to Florida with my entire family over Spring Break. I went to Disney World for two days and really enjoyed all the fast rides, ice cream and the parade. On the last day, we went to the beach and splashed in the water and made a gigantic sandcastle that we decorated with shells. 

The expectations are currently lower than we would expect for grade 3's and 4's. As the class gets more comfortable and improves their writing fluency, we will be increasing expectations. By the end of the school year, we hope that they will be writing paragraphs that are on topic and organized, flow well with a variety of sentence beginnings & lengths, have adjectives and have appropriate punctuation, capitalization and spelling. 

We also had our first commonly spelled word list this week. we talked to the class about how these words are mostly easy. They are based off of the top 300 most used words in writing and are words that the children need to spell properly in their writing. 

With this homework, we also told the class that some of them may need to adjust their homework schedules if they have lots of extra curricular activities. For example, if you have Soccer on Tuesday, perhaps you will do Monday and Tuesday on the first day. We also noticed there were a lot of late assignments this first week. As we get into the routine of Homework, we will be tightening up on making sure students turn in their homework on time. The goal is for the class to learn some organizational skills and responsibility towards their own learning. 

In Math, we continued to practice increasing and decreasing patterns. We learned to set up a t-chart and transferred data from growing T's and growing L's. We learned to describe a pattern by making sure we had three pieces of information:

1. What type of pattern is it? (Repeating/ Increasing/ Decreasing)

2. How is the pattern changing?

3. Where does the pattern begin? 

In the coming weeks, we will continue to practice pattern and hopefully move further away from having to build our patterns to just examining how the data in our t-charts change. We will also gradually begin to use algebraic expressions to explain our patterns. 

We also began to review representing numbers with base ten blocks. We reviewed our place value systems of Units/ Tens/ Hundreds and learned how to draw these numbers using base ten blocks. The grade 3's are focusing on understanding numbers to 1000, while the grade 4's are to 10 000. Number sense will be ongoing throughout the year. 

In Science, we dipped our toes into Biomes. We will continue to learn about different types of biomes and the effects of climate. 

The class also worked on a time capsule that will be opened in June. They have so far, enclosed a self-portait, writing sample, talked about current events and three wishes they have for themselves.  It will be very exciting to re-read how much we have changed in 9 months!

In Writing, we finished our final copies of our Wishes writing and they are now proudly on display in the hall. We also received our Writer's Workshop folders. We are super excited about become real-estate agents next week and preparing some descriptions of some supremely haunted houses that we have up for sale! 

Hope everyone has a wonderful weekend!

September 29th, 2023

Hi All! What a week it's been.  Thank you for sending in changes of clothing and indoor shoes. With the weather turning this past week, it's definitely helped keep the mud, water and grass out of our room! 

Grade 4 families - Mrs. Palmer sent an email on Friday regarding a Bicyling program that will be occuring next Thursday. If you could, please shoot us an email if you are unable to send your child with a bicycle and helmet as the program will arrange to have one available. If you could also please send completed forms back to school on Tuesday, we would be most appreciative. Let us know if you need us to send you a hard copy!

The class has definitely become more comfortable and they are all starting to better understand our routines. With this, comes lots of chatter! We have had a number of conversations around how to be listeners and what that looks like. We have had a few situations that have resulted in conversations around respect - both towards each other and towards adults. The class has been reminded about what it means to be a PG Orca - being safe, respectful and responsible. As a school, we have tightened up playground rules as we have noticed that students have been not making the best decisions while outside, particularly in the backfields near the trees. It's been noted that some of these students come from our class! In the coming week, the staff (and students) will be have a closer look at recess/lunch expectations. 

This week we continued learning our routines for word sorts. This will become a daily routine where students will learn about spelling patterns which will also support their reading. We also continued to edit our writing and looked at punctuation and spelling. We talked about how it's important to focus during writing as we can only improve if we practice! 

Next week, two new pieces of homework will be going home. The first one is going to be "Sentences of the Week". This will be broken down into four days - day 1 is a brainstorm on the given topic, day 2 & 3 ask for 1-2 sentences being written on the topic and on day 4, students will be editing and re-writing their mini paragraphs. We are finding that the class is really struggling to string together 4 solid sentences around a topic without a lot of help. With this homework, the hope is that they will increase their writing fluency and also begin to improve their writing by including details in their writing, experimenting with different sentences starters and choosing interesting words. 

The second piece of homework is a spelling list. This will go home at the beginning of the week and the students will have a test at the end of the week. It consists of ten words - these words are based of the most commonly used words in our daily writing. These words are really words that they should be spelling correctly by the time they reach intermediate. Most of these words are not very challenging so it shouldn't take much time to review. The aim is for students to properly apply them to their writing and not default back to "kid spell" (which is great when it comes to challenging words!) 

In Math, we continued to look at growing patterns. We learned how to set up a t-chart and began to look at a growing t-pattern that we built with square tiles. What we are practicing know is setting students up to better understand that there are patterns within data and that eventually, we can solve our problems using algebraic expressions.  

For Truth and Reconciliation this week, we watched some beautifully put together videos by the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation. We learned about the foods residential school survivors had to eat while they were there and about how some sports supported their difficult times. We read the story about Phyllis Webstad and her orange shirt and learned about how Orange Shirt Day came to be. We also read Shi-Shi-Etko and learned about how a little girl felt when she was preparing to leave her home to attend residential school without her family. 

We made beautiful fall art with Mrs. Scarr. It is on display at the front office - pop by and take a peek if you have a chance! 

Have a wonderful weekend!

September 20th, 2023

Welcome to a new school year!! We were so happy to see everyone who was able to come to Open House last night and look forward to meeting more of you during parent teacher conferences in October.

We have slowly been easing into routines and gearing up to go full speed ahead with our learning. The class is settling into routines and expectations well. Some helpful information for families:

• Planners are written in almost daily. Please prompt your child to show you their planner each night and have them return it to their backpack when you've read it.

• Water bottles - students are encouraged to have a water bottle with them in class. We have talked to them about only having water and using them appropriately (ie. not becoming a distraction!)

• A change of clothing should be sent with each student as the weather is starting to shift - hopefully this will also save you some trips to school during the work day!

•  If your child does not already have a pair of runners at school, please send a pair as soon as you can. 

• If you have any extra school supplies at home that are on the list, please send them in ASAP. Particularly exercise books, pencils, erasers and glue sticks. Any unused supplies will be returned to you at the end of the year. 

• This year, PE will be on Thursdays and Fridays and Library will be on Tuesdays. 

In the coming weeks, we will start up a home reading program - our books only go up to a certain level so once a student has surpassed that level, they are encouraged to select their own books and read for a minimum of 15 minutes most nights of the week. We are also going to begin a "commonly spelled word" program - many of these words are very basic but we frequently find that students are not applying appropriate spelling to their daily writing. The list will go home on Mondays and a "test" will be on Friday. 

In Language Arts, we have been writing down some goals and wishes we have for this school year. We have been working on our drafts and have been talking about complete sentences, how to brainstorm and how to use the ideas from our brainstorm to apply to our own writing. Today, we began the process of "editing". We talked about capitalization rules and will continue with punctuation and spelling next week. 

We have also been learning about building our reading stamina as a class. We began with a talking about how we select books from our class library. We use the following rule:

I - I can chose my own books

P - Purpose - why do I want to read this book?

I - Interest - does this book interest me?

C - Comprehend - Do I understand what I'm reading?

K - Know - Do I know most of the words. (We use the 5 finger rule for this - select a page with a good amount of words and go through it. Each time you come across a word you don't know, you put a finger up. If you have 5 fingers up the book is a "not yet" book. A great fitting book will have about 3 words you don't know and an easy book is one where you know all the words.

We have also been practicing "how not to read to self" vs. "how to read to self" by modeling:

• read and focus on your reading

• get started right away

• stay in one spot

• read the whole time

• have a quiet body

So far, we have managed to make it to 1 minute, 40 seconds of every single student following these guidelines. The goal is to make it to 20 minutes so that we can build our reading fluency and allow for Ms. Tan and Ms. O'Gorman to work with reading groups. 

In Math, we have started our patterning unit. This week, we have been examining the patterns that occur in skip counting by 2's and 3's. We found lots of neat things from looking at a hundreds chart with these skip counting patterns. We also learned that these patterns can help us find "short cuts" or "lazy" ways to memorize our skip counting. So cool! 

Today, we created "monsters" that grow in a predicable way each day. In teams of two, we designed a monster and drew how it grew from Monday to Wednesday. Next week, we will swap monsters and new teams will have to figure out and describe how each monster grows. 

We have also started gearing up for October 2nd - National Day for Truth and Reconciliation. We have been learning about what this day means, how it began and have/will be continuing to discuss the history of residential schools as well as learn about Indigenous culture in Canada. We will participate in some virtual workshops next week as well. 

Last week, we celebrated Dot Day by reading "The Dot" by Peter Reynolds. We each created a beautiful dot using water colours. We had a great discussion about having a growth mindset and how it relates to the story. Hopefully families had a chance to take a peek at the display on the bulletin board in the hall yesterday! 

Students is also building a time capsule that will be opened at the end of the school year. It will be really exciting to see how much we've grown and changed when we open them at the end of June. 

Signing off for now! Please check out the Instagram icon above - we try to post pictures of what we are doing in class as often as we can. 

IT & JO

April 19th, 2023

Hi everyone! What a busy week it's been so far. Our potato plants are coming along well and the class has started to look at some seeds that we will be planting in the garden. 

We have two upcoming field trips: 

1. Cannery on Monday. Please be sure to send a booster (if required), a bagged lunch and dress warmly. We will also be heading to the Steveston playground afterwards to have some fun, so please have proper footwear!

2. Shrek Jr - the field trip form went home today.  Please be on the lookout for a purple sheet.

This week, we started a new writing activity. We brainstormed a list of things that we would see, hear, smell, taste and touch in the Spring. The goal of this activity is to continue practicing expanding our sentences and applying adjectives to our writing. The hope is the turnaround on this writing project will be a quick one so we can continue to experiment with different writing genres. The class did really well at applying their brainstormed ideas into sentence form and it was so nice to see that the idea of expanding sentences and using adjectives is becoming easier!

In Reading, we continued to learn about inferencing. The class did some of this already in the fall, but as it's a trickier reading comprehension skill, we are re-visiting to practice and deepen our understanding of this metacognitive tool. This week, we watched a short film called "the Blue Umbrella" by Pixar. It had no words to it so the students had to infer what was happening and what the story was about. Each student then drew a picture and wrote about what the short film was about. Since it was our first time doing it, we are practicing to include details, write in the proper order of events and include some of the emotions from the characters. Ms. Tan shared the summary that her own kids had and the class enjoyed how her littlest (3 years) included how "the umbrella was sad. Everyone was sad."

In Math, we have continued to look at fractions. This week we learned a new game called "wipe out" where we begin with a whole (the hexagon) and roll a dice that had 1/2, 1/3 or 1/6 on it. Depending on what we rolled, we had to remove that fraction from the whole. At the beginning, it was challenging, but once we got the hang of it, we had lots of fun and were able to even start with 2 or 3 wholes and work our way down to 0.  The purpose of this activity was to better understand the idea of what a fraction is (we reviewed what a numerator and denominator was) and to have some experience around equivalent fractions as some of us realized that when we had two 1/6 pieces, it was the same as 1/3 or when we had three 1/6 pieces it was the same as a half! Pretty neat!

This week, we also wrote a new math problem using the theme of the Spring fair. It was a subtraction problem with a twist! We had a X number of bottles at the beginning of the game, but by the time we left the gym, we had X bottles remaining. How many bottles did we win? Each student selected a number that was "just right" in terms of being challenging. We talked about how this is like an elastic band - we need something that stretches our brains but it can't sag or it's too easy. However, if it's stretched too far, it'll snap and we'll get super frustrated. Each student will then conference with Ms. Tan at some point! 

While some of us had meetings with Ms. Tan today, the rest of the class played Wipe Out, Add 9 (a math game to practice their +9 math facts) and Circular Nim which is a strategy game. Circular Nim can easily be played at home! All you need is 13 playing chips that you arrange in a circle. Players take turns taking either 1 or 2 adjacent chips. The person to remove the last chip is the winner! The game goes quickly and is great fun! 

In HACE, we talked about the 5 reasons for touch: caring, fun, health, hygiene and help. We also discussed how some of us might find some things to be fun, while others don't. We gave the example of tickling. Ms. Tan said she hated to be tickled and some of the class said that they enjoyed it! This helped us understand why it's important to ask permission before we touch and that we are allowed to speak up for ourselves when we feel that someone's touch is uncomfortable. We also talked about how some forms of touching might overlap into more than one reason. Our next lesson is going to be around online safety. 

Lastly, a special thank-you to all of you for getting the field trip notices back so quickly! Parent volunteers, you are also extremely appreciated - we can't do it without you! 

Have a nice evening!

April 4th, 2023

Hi families! Apologies for the lack of posts lately!

We have been busy, busy, busy!

In Writing, we are nearly complete our animal riddles. Each student chose an animal and through structured lessons, they had learned to begin their sentences in different ways, how to use onomatopoeia (which is very amusing, because Ms. Tan has a terrible time pronouncing that word!), extending their sentences and applying adjectives to their writing.  After students finished their drafts, they were responsible for checking their punctuation, spelling and capitalization before they had a conference with me. This afternoon, we will be finishing off our animal art that goes along with our riddles. 

In the past few days, we've had a few conversations around taking care of ourselves and our learning. We talked about how there are 22 students and 1 teacher and that they each know what they are to be doing to help improve their writing skills. Our role as the teacher, is to help them and make sure they are learning. We do this because we care about them and want them to be successful. However, the most important person who cares, needs to be themselves! So, this means, being on-task during writing time and not distracting ourselves! They did really well this morning and most of them were taking much better care at trying to be focused and practicing their writing skills. 

In Reading, we have started to focus on the reading comprehension strategy of Inferencing (reading between the lines, being a detective and trying to figure out what the author's message is). Some of this will be done through games as we want the children to really understand what inferencing means before we start to apply this strategy in text as it can be a bit tricky!

In Math, we have been continuing with front end addition and have also been looking at arrays that relate to multiplication. This week, we also started to use cuisenaire rods to explore the meaning of fractions. We have been learning about 1/2, 1/3, 1/4, .... 1/8! We talked about what the numerator and denominator represent  and discovered that when we have the same number in the numerator as the denominator, it's always one because it's the whole (the entire thing!).  We will continue to solidify this concept as the skills we are currently working on are foundation skills in fractions. 

Students brought home a booklet of math facts yesterday and are bringing skip counting home today. They each have a copy in class, but we thought it might be helpful to also have these at home. The children may cut them apart and practice these with you - they should try to use their strategies rather than count on their fingers. The aim is to be able to recall each fact within 5 seconds. Skip counting is also the jumping block to multiplication, so it's extremely beneficial for your child to practice their skip counting. We suggest they begin with counting by 10, 5, 2, 3, 4 and then 6. As you will notice, there is a pattern on the hundreds chart which lends itself nicely to memorization (and later on down the road, the connection between multiples!) 

Ending here for now. Hope everyone is enjoying the sunshine!

IT

February 1, 2023

Just a quick update for this week as we have been preparing for student led conferences! Please sign up on parent connect if you haven't had the opportunity - they are being held on Tuesday and Thursday of next week.

In this week's planner, students were asked to practice Math facts. We had some notes about not knowing what this meant. Here are some of the addition facts that students should have firmly under their belts:

Make ten: 1+9, 2+ 8, 3+7, 4+6, etc.

Doubles: 1+1, 2+2, 3+3, etc.

9+: 1+9, 2+9, 3+9, 4+9, etc. (for this one, student should "take" one from the non 9 number and "give" it to 9 to make ten, then add).

Doubles + 1: 1+2, 2+3, 3+4, etc. (for 5+6: double 5 + 1 more)

This is a balance between rote memorization and using strategy to help them remember their facts. As they become more comfortable with their addition facts, subtraction facts can also be included (will touch on this at a later date).

Continue to practice skip counting as well as this is a huge stepping stone to memorizing multiplication facts!

Enjoy your evenings!

IT

January 20, 2023

This term is going to fly by extremely fast. Previews went out earlier and we will be into term 2 reports before we know it. 

In Writing this week, we finished up extending some of our sentences and then dove into applying our understanding of adjectives to our writing. The class received an inventory of interesting colour words as well as adjectives and started to also identify some interesting words while listening to stories. We will start to gather our own bank of words as we read different texts and hopefully, students will begin to apply these adjectives and adverbs to their writing with increasingly more independence. The plan for next week is to take a look at our sentences and make sure we are not repeating the same structures too often and to begin editing for capitals, spelling and punctuation. The goal is to share the good copies of our creature writing during student led conferences.

In Reading, we continued to practice our decoding strategies and have been really taking note of "look at the first letter", "find chunks you know" and asking ourselves "does it make sense?" and "does it sound right?"

We also generated two lists that went home on Wednesday - "OO" and "AR" words. Please have them practice reading the tool sounds on a regular basis and try to remind them if they struggle with any of these sounds in their reading! 

We have quite a number of topics on the go in Math. We have been learning about time and telling time in 5 minute increments. We have been practicing on individual clocks and will continue to do this until we are able to recognize time more fluently. We also discussed some of the language around time: half past, quarter to, etc. 

We began to learn about front end addition (adding from the greatest place value first) and have been practicing building and recording addition with and without regrouping. The grade 2's will be working on adding two digit numbers and the grade 3's will be adding three digit numbers. Naturally, if students will begin at a place value that they understand and work their way onto more challenging questions. We suspect we will have some students adding into the thousands and perhaps the tens of thousands! 

We also continued investigating multiplication and have started to create our own stories around multiplication. As we grow more comfortable with the concept of multiplication, we will begin to write and solve word problems to better understand how it appears in real life. 

As if all this wasn't enough, we also started investigating the concept of division. On Wednesday, we learned a new game called "Boats and Boxes". Students use a spinner to determine a number. Following this, they use patterns blocks  with a partner, to figure out how many boats (yellow hexagon) will be required to transport the number of boxes spun. They begin with the red trapezoid, then the blue rhombus and finally finish with the green triangles. They are filling in a chart to hopefully begin to see a pattern. The lesson develops understanding in division, basic fractions (relationships between halves, thirds and eighths) and patterning. They found it a bit challenging, but also thought provoking. It was so nice to see how well they learned together and how focused they all were! This is also a "to be continued" lesson/ concept! 

On Thursday, the entire school met up with their family groups in the gym. They created a Lunar New Year dragon as a school and enjoyed some lovely stories about the Lunar new year. The goal around family groupings is to create community amongst all age groups - so that our younger students feel comfortable with our older students and for the older students to have the opportunity to have a leadership role. 

Signing off for now. Have a lovely weekend - hopefully the sun will shine!

IT 

January 13, 2023

Happy New Year! We have been back for nearly two weeks and the break seems like a distant memory, we hope everyone had a great one!

We hit the ground running as second term seems to always fly by in the blink of an eye. We also find that second term is one of the most productive learning time of the school year. Can't wait!

In reading, we have continued with our read to self/ guided reading sessions. During read to self, groups are given some time to practice their reading on Simbi. We were able to contact them as we were having quite a few issues around loading the site and they said that if the iOS is updated to the latest version, it should do the trick - please give it a try at home and encourage your child to practice on the site a few times a week! 

We also began to practice asking questions as one of our reading comprehension strategies. We reviewed why we make connections, ask questions and visualize (make a movie of the words you read) - to better understand (depth!) what we read. We thought about how we watch TV shows or movies and that we regularly make connections or ask questions, but we want to develop our connections/questions into deeper ones. This week and last week, we read two Indigenous folk tales and asked many fantastic questions around what we read. We identified quick thinking questions which can be answered as we read and some deep thinking questions which leave us pondering potential answers. 

We have also practiced our decoding skills (figuring out words that we don't know how to read) and have practiced:

• looking at the first letter

• finding chunks we know

• looking for little words in big words

We learned a few new "tool" sounds which we brainstormed lists for and made up funny stories using the words we brainstormed. These lists can be found in their yellow duotangs. Please have your child practice reading the lists and stories and reviewing the rules. They were also given a tool sound summary sheet which they recorded the 10 sounds that we already know/learned. This sheet is one that they can reference while they read if they come across any of these patterns in a word they are trying to decode.

In Writing, we continued working on expanding our sentences and applied our skills with a partner in order to revise our Creature writing. In the coming week, we are going to be looking at word choice and how we begin our sentences - do they all start differently? Have a different pattern? 

Math has been busy! We have completed one word problem that required the class to figure out the missing subtrahend (the two numbers in a subtraction equation). Some of us are still not quite done, but will hopefully finish it next week. We have also been learning front end addition - adding with big numbers that don't require and require regrouping along with exploring the idea of multiplication. We've begun to connect to the idea of multiplication with repeated adding and "groups of". For example:

If Ms. Tan had 6 plates and on each plate, she had 3 chocolate chip cookies:

 3+3+3+3+3+3

6 groups of 3

skip counting by 3: 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18

She would have 18 cookies!

We will continue to explore situations where we would use multiplication and connect adding, skip counting and groups of to these situations before we begin to introduce some basic multiplication facts (to grade 3's and any 2's that are ready/want to learn). We also talked about why it's super important to practice our skip counting facts - it makes multiplication super easy to learn!

Speaking of skip counting! Please help your child practice:

Grade 2's: (to 100)

• skip-counting by 2, 5, and 10:

  • using different starting points

  • increasing and decreasing (forward and backward)

Grade 3's (to 1000 - if they understand the pattern and can fluently skip count to at least 100, this should be pretty ok!):

• skip-counting by any number from any starting point, increasing and decreasing (i.e., forward and backward)

Have a wonderful weekend everyone!

IT

December 1st, 2022

Hoping everyone is keeping warm!! 

It was been quite an interesting two weeks. Last week, we had LOTS of students away. We had a very light Monday and decided to continue with most regularly scheduled learning on Tuesday. 

This week, we have jumped back into our word sorts as they were put on pause for most of last week. We've had a few questions around Dictation so we thought we would explain here (information can also be found under Language arts --> Word Sorts). Dictation is essentially a spelling test. We randomly select 10 words from their word sorts. Any mistakes on the test are re-written 8 times for homework and we ask grownups to initial/sign the test so we know you've seen it. Students are generally quite prepared by the end of the sorting cycle but some may want/need some review at home. At the beginning of each cycle, we send a copy of the new sort home - students are asked to put them into their planner pockets as soon as they receive them (but we sometimes still find them on the floor!) Activities are completed at school so the only thing families are asked to do is have their children practice reading the words and reviewing the vocabulary and spelling rules that they are learning in the sort (which we teach on the first day of the cycle).

In Math, we have been alternating between practicing representing numbers and continuing to look at patterns. WIth representing numbers, students are doing this by building with base ten blocks, drawing them and writing them in expanded form. In the coming weeks, we will also look at multiple ways to represent the same number and slowly ease into front end addition. In patterning, we have been exploring increasing patterns. We have extended growing T's, U's, hexagon "dragons" and for some, fir trees! With each pattern, students had to figure out if the pattern was repeating, increasing or decreasing and HOW it was doing so. After that, they were asked to extend the pattern by 2 terms and use what they built to fill in a t-chart. From there, we looked at the t-charts to see what the numbers were doing. Were they adding the same thing each time? How was it growing? From there, students had to extend the t-chart until they reach the 10th term - but no building allowed this time! We decided that it was "way too much work" to build that many terms, filling out the t-chart was much easier! The last step was to describe the pattern by identifying 1- where the pattern began 2- what type of pattern it was 3- how the pattern changed each time.  All in all, there has been some fantastic learning in the last week! 

Lastly, before signing off: we are starting to deplete our supply of pencils, eraser and for some students, glue sticks. Please send any that you have in "stock" at home! For those students that do not have inside shoes, please send those in ASAP as well! Thank you so much!