Welcome Back!

Happy New Year to everyone. I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday and enjoyed time with friends and family.

This month, we are starting to learn about measurement in math. Today we began by reviewing what we have learned in the past about standard and non-standard units, and why it is important to have standard units of measurement. Then we reviewed about how to convert metric measurements, and I taught the class an easy way to do this. See this video for the method I taught them. It is really easy and can be used for all metric units. Over the course of this unit we will be covering:

• area of rectangles, parallelograms and triangles
• surface area  of rectangular and triangular prisms
• volume of rectangular and triangular prisms
• relating area and perimeter
• converting units of mass and capacity
• relating units of capacity to volume (eg. 1 ML = 1 cubic CM)
• converting units of volume (eg. 1 cubic meter = 1,000,000 cubic cm)
• solving problems in which units are not all the same. (Eg. The area of a triangle is 1.5 square metres. The base is 500 cm. What is the height?) 

This can be a challenging unit for many students so we will be taking quite a long time to get through all of the concepts. In the meantime, here are some Blendspace units that cover much of the material, with many parts that are review. 

Measurement

Area of Parallelograms

Area of Triangles

Converting Metric Measures

Surface Area

Surface Area of Triangular Prisms

Volume of Triangular Prisms

Volume of Rectangular Prisms

In Language, we are going to be focusing on the Oral communication skill of effective listening, which we call active listening in class. We will be practising out listening skills by talking to our peers and retelling the messages they tell us, and we will also practice by watching a variety of short videos and answering questions about them to demonstrate our understanding. We will also be focusing on identifying the features of some media texts and using our understanding to develop a media presentation of our own. 

In Science, we have been learning about electricity for the Grade 6's and States of  Matter for the Grade 5's. We will continue to learn about these topics throughout the month of January. 

Again, I hope everyone had a wonderful holiday. As always, thank you for your continued support and if you have any questions please feel free to contact me any time.