October 2020

October 2nd, 2020

Happy October everyone!

This week, we listened to the final episode of the first season of The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel. What an ending! After answering questions about what they think might come next, students are now in the process of planning out the script for season 2, episode 1, using a graphic organizer. That's right, they're in charge of writing what they believe will come next. Today we learned about writing dialogue and quotation marks. This work will continue next week as students take their plan and bring them to life. Once we have finished writing and sharing our versions of episode 1, we will jump back in and start listening again. In the meantime, if you and your child are interested in finding out more about Aurora, here's a bonus episode for you to listen to.

Catapults were sending marshmallows flying this week. Inspired by JP's launch over the titanium wall - ask your child about episode 9! - students were tasked with using the Engineering Design Process to build a catapult that would hit a hologram target of Mr. Oliver Pruitt. We're learning what makes a strong and stable structure as we move into better understanding the forces acting on structures. It's been great to see the problem solving and critical thinking skills involved as group members explain their thinking and choices for materials to use in our builds. Please take some time to speak with your child about the successes and failures of today's task.

In Math, we continued to look at the cost of living and determined that $15 isn't in fact a livable wage. We also continued to discuss how to clearly explain our thinking in answering questions related to mathematical concepts. We're also learning the importance of using data to drive action. Next week, students will be responsible for crafting their own surveys as we reflect on changes we want to see at Sloane. Students have been asked to think of one rich question to have ready for Monday's Math class.

In Music, we continued to reflect on songs by listening to Molly Johnson's Lucky; Frank Sinatra's Come Fly With Me; and Pharrell Williams' Happy. It's been great having students share their song choices as they apply the critical analysis process to communicate feelings, ideas, and understandings in response to a variety of music. This week, our reflection questions were:

• What do you think is happening?

• Where is it happening?

• What genre of music is it? How do you know?

• Describe the music.

• How does it make you feel? Why?

• What mood or emotions does the music evoke?

• What is the message being communicated?

• What connections can you make to the music?

Next week, we will continue to reflect on the song choices of our peers.

This Wednesday was Orange Shirt Day. We continued learning about Truth and Reconciliation by watching 2 videos that shed light on the truth about Residential Schools and the experiences of Indigenous People. Students also had the opportunity to witness the resistance and resilience of Indigenous people along with learning parts of various Indigenous cultures. On Wednesday, students were given the opportunity to create a button about Orange Shirt Day in hopes of continuing the conversation well beyond the day. You may notice that your child has their button attached to their backpack, please take a minute to ask them about the significance of the day.

Our bioglyphs are almost finished and ready to go up on our walls. Students took the time this week to type out the good copies of their paragraphs and many finished colouring in the backgrounds. Next week, we'll practice reading the information and we'll also try to determine who is who.

Curriculum Night for our class will be on Thursday, October 8th from 7pm to 7:15pm. I will be sending an email to parents on Tuesday with the link for our Google Meet and more information that you should keep handy this year. If you are unable to join at that time, please feel free to send me an email with any questions that you may have once the curriculum information has been shared.

It was a great week and I hope that you have a restful weekend!

October 9th, 2020

What a busy week! With many changes happening at school, I want to start by saying how grateful I am to have had the opportunity to connect with parents during our Curriculum Night, this past Thursday. It was nice having the chance to meet families virtually and to share a little about this year's learning journey. You'll notice that I made updates to our weekly schedule and the curriculum expectations for this year. Please know that you are always welcome to email me - arianna.lambert@tdsb.on.ca or call the school to set up an appointment for us to connect virtually. I look forward to continuing to partner with you to make this a successful year for your child.

In Language this week, students learned about using quotation marks in dialogues and important elements of writing scripts. Given 2 different options - writing a dialogue or script - students started to write their version of season 2, episode 1 of The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel. Following their plan from the previous week, students were eager to share their thoughts on what they believe will happen next. Many have mentioned being finished, so next week, we will have the opportunity to work on editing and depending on time, we might even have the chance to jump in and start listening to season 2.

In Math, students learned to use Google Forms to be able to create a survey based on their big question from Monday. We're hoping to get responses soon so that we can graph them and ultimately create an action plan for making our school community a better place. Students also had the opportunity to use mPower. The activity that they worked on was related to Science in that students were tasked with creating a playground. As the year progresses, we will be using online tools to support the learning of mathematical concepts and ideas in the classroom.

In Science, we continued our conversations around the learning happening through our STEM Challenges. This week, we discussed the idea of failure and that learning happens when we have the opportunity to hear and see the ideas of others in order to make improvements. We also took the time to understand structures and that they can be big or small. We started to look at the forces that we applied on the structures we made during our challenges. Next week, we will be continuing the learning about forces as we start to investigate natural disasters.

As we continue with Social Studies, we are going to investigate Indigenous Communities as we try to understand these elements within them. We'll also explore changes which occurred as a result of European settlers.

We continued listening to and analyzing the song choices of students. It's been great having a variety of different genres of songs shared, many of which have been quite nostalgic.

Due to reorganization at our school, we're excited to be having 4 more students joining our classroom next week. With this, we will be continuing to build our classroom community and work towards make sure that we keep our safety protocols in place, ensuring the safety of everyone in our learning space.

It's been quite the week! Wishing everyone a happy, safe and restful long weekend!

October 16th, 2020

A shorter week but a great one nonetheless! Due to re-organization, we were lucky to have 4 students join our classroom learning space. We've shifted our tables and desks and we're all settling in nicely.

In Language, students continued to work on completing their scripts for season 2, episode 1 of The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel. Once finished, students were given the opportunity to connect with a peer and edit their work. This week, we also learned about writing summaries. Students were given some practice using the "somebody wanted but so then" method. After watching the video below, we read a couple of And Then It Happened stories and realized it's an easy way to summarize any narrative. We'll use this as we continue to listen to the podcast, summarizing each episode. On Friday, students started season 2 and also received their own copy of the book which was released earlier this month. I hope that they enjoy reading the book and hopefully we'll see if there are any differences between it and the podcast.

In Math this week, we had a lot of practice on creating double- and stacked-bar graphs as well as determining the mode, mean and median. We also had the opportunity to complete the surveys of our peers based on their big questions. As we completed surveys, we realized that for some, there were changes to be made. This was great learning because it helped us to understand that our surveys need to be clear, otherwise our questions may be interpreted differently. Next week we'll continue to complete these online surveys, take a look at the data and start to create our action plans for change in our Sloane School Community.

In Social Studies, we continued to reflect on what makes a society and we used our 6 elements - government, settlements, agriculture, religion, sciences/innovations, written language - to learn about different groups of Indigenous Peoples in Canada. In small groups, students had the opportunity to select a group to learn about. Using our Virtual Library, they gathered and organized information and they will be presenting their research next week to the class. As we continue to learn about different Indigenous Peoples, students will analyse some key short- and long-term consequences of interactions among and between First Nations and European explorers and settlers in New France prior to 1713.

In Visual Arts, students started looking at the element of form and sketched a variety of 3D shapes to give the illusion of depth. Next week, we will continue to look at how shading can contribute to the illusion of depth also.

This week was the first of our Physical Education classes together. Due to the incredible weather, students were able to participate in co-operative activities outside! From Soccer Baseball to a version of European Handball, students are demonstrating their understanding of how to collaborate as a team to achieve a goal. As we continue to build our new classroom community, we will be continuing to participate in co-operative games.

I hope that you have a happy, safe and restful weekend.

October 23rd, 2020

Who knew such a rainy week would end in sunshine and warmth? Today we had the chance to get outside and end our week with an intense game of Capture the Flag. In Physical Education this week, we continued to play co-operative games as we learn how to better strategies with teammates in order to win. We're also learning how to stay safe while playing some pretty competitive games. As the colder weather settles in, we will be using the Gym for Physical Education.

We continued with summaries, discussion questions and predictions in Language this week. There were a number of twists and turns as we listened this week. If you've got the time this weekend, take a couple of minutes to ask your child what we've been listening to. As they continue to practice, they should be getting better at succinctly summarizing episodes, although they do get really excited about everything that is going on. We are almost finished season 2 and next week, we will be digging deeper into character analysis and how authors develop their characters. For Media Literacy, we are working on the Sloane Announcements. This week we brainstormed ideas about what the announcements might look like so that they can have student voice. We're understanding the purpose of the announcements and what should be contained within. Over the next few weeks, we're excited to get writing, practicing and announcing!

In Math, we wrapped up our Data Management unit. Over the last few weeks, students have been tasked with: drawing double and stacked bar graphs; interpreting data and graphs; creating their own surveys; developing action plans; and determining the mean, median and mode from a set of data. This week as we finished up assignments, students also had the opportunity to answer questions in IXL to test their knowledge. Two links that might be of benefit for further practice are Interpret bar graphs: multi-step problems and Interpret charts to find mean, median and mode. Both will come in handy as we move into our next unit of Numbers where students will be performing operations with numbers in real life contexts. This week we explored the ways in which we use numbers on a daily basis as students in groups brainstormed ideas and shared dozens of ideas.

This week we started a Design Thinking project with a guiding question of: How might we minimize the impact of hurricanes on humans and the environment. Students were tasked this week with researching in order to deeply understand the impact of hurricanes. In Padlet, we combined our ideas so that as a class we could learn from the ideas of others. Next week, we will start to understand who we would like to build our solution for and we'll get into my favourite part, ideation!

A Friday email was sent to parents this week regarding Halloween. Please take some time to review the information with your child, keeping in mind that we do have Physical Education at the end of the day on Fridays. Today was absolutely beautiful and yet we know that true October weather is coming. Students will be outside for recess so please make sure that they can bundle up and stay warm. I hope that you have a wonderful weekend!

October 30, 2020

I can't believe that this is the last post for the month of October! Where has the month gone?

In Language this week, we continued with listening to our podcast - The Unexplainable Disappearance of Mars Patel. After summarizing episodes and answering discussion questions, students were tasked with analyzing 2 characters. Given a graphic organizer, students were asked to answer the following questions for their characters:

• What might they be feeling?

• What are they seeing?

• What are they doing?

• What do they care most about?

• What are they saying?

• What might they be thinking?

• Since the beginning of the podcast, how have they changed?

We're almost at the end of season 2! With many twists and turns so far, it's hard to predict what might happen next but we've been hard at work trying to piece together this interesting puzzle.

This week we also spent some time understanding the purpose of announcements and writing a script that pairs will use as they produce short videos for the Sloane Announcements. Next week is our first week at trying this new way of doing the announcements and we're excited to see how it goes and to see what changes we'll need to make along the way.

In Math, we continued with our new unit, Numbers. Students this week learned about composing and decomposing numbers. Numbers are composed when two or more numbers are combined to create a larger number. For example, the numbers 100 and 2 can be composed to make the sum 102 or the product 200. Numbers can be decomposed as a sum of numbers. For example, 53 125 can be decomposed into 50 000 and 3000 and 100 and 25. After a refresher on place value, students were tasked with writing numbers in expanded form. For example, a number can be represented in expanded form as 34 187 = 30 000 + 4000 + 100 + 80 + 7, or as 3 × 10 000 + 4 × 1000 + 1 × 100 + 3 × 10 + 7, to show place value relationships.

We also started to use operations (addition, subtraction, and multiplication) in real-life scenarios to solve problems. We started with subtraction as we tried to find Kaprekar's Constant. Students were also given a variety of problems to solve in a matching game where they had to find the correct answer to multi-step problems. We also spent some time learning about the Box Method for multiplication. Next week, we will continue to investigate numbers and use operations to solve real problems in everyday life.

In Social Studies we continued to read the Kayak magazine mentioned last week to understand Treaties. Students are currently summarizing information from the text in order to understand more about treaties. As we continue to learn, particularly since next week is Treaties Recognition Week, students will start to create an infographic to help others understand treaties in Canada.

In Science, we took some time to understand our users as we try to solve the problem of minimizing the impact of hurricanes on humans and the environment. After watching a video, we started to reflect on those specifically impacted and selected a user that we wanted to be able to empathize with. Students then created a user persona where they thought about what their users might be doing, saying, thinking and feeling in relation to the problem. We quickly identified that without interviewing actual users, we are making some assumptions and that this will cause bias in our solutions. Once we picked a specific user, we jumped into ideation. Using Crazy 8s, students came up with 8 wild ideas for our problem. Once finished, they reflected on their ideas and have started to create storyboards, outlining their solutions. Next week, we will be taking some time to offer critiques to one another before we start to plan for our prototypes.

In Physical Education, we continued to participate in co-operative games and we are learning how to be safe and to support one another during play. It was amazing to see students cheering each other on this week as we played number basketball and number soccer.

In Music, we continued with our analysis of songs with selections from students. We are excited to be starting virtual Orff lessons next week with an instructor. As we learn more, we will be starting to create our own music to communicate feelings and ideas and considering how we might use found materials to produce pieces of music.

Well, the first 2 months of school have finished and we're well into the swing of things. Please remember that the weather is quickly changing and students will be outside for all recesses. I hope that you have a happy and safe weekend!