Christmas Concert Friday

The junior Christmas Concert will take place on Friday at 10:50 AM. According to the schedule right now, it looks as though our class may be going first, although that may change.

For our concert, we will be doing a few songs using Boomwhackers. The students have been practising quite a lot and are quite good at the songs!

For the concert, I have asked children to simply wear Christmas colours (green red or white). If they wish to wear a santa hat, that is fine, but not necessary. Thank you!

I would like to wish everyone in our community a wonderful Christmas, with all the joys that the season brings. I hope you all have a great holiday.

As always, if you have any questions, please feel free to contact me any time.

Data Management Test Next Week!

Next week on Thursday we will have our Data Management test. We have flown through this unit, as it is generally pretty easy. The one area that students struggle with is finding a missing value in a set of data when given the mean. I teach the students to "work backwards" in order to find the solution. We did this today, and students did very well! We will practice some more on Monday.

Here is a Hapara Workspace that I have put together to assist students in learning and studying this material. If students are comfortable with all of the material here, they will be fine. Be sure to check out the link to the Blendspace, which has videos, games and more to help practice.

Data Management Workspace

Our first lesson was on interpreting graphs, which is fairly easy for most students to understand. Here is a short presentation that can be used to remind students of our learning:

Interpreting Graphs Grade 6

We also have learned about finding the Mean, the Median and the Mode, which are all forms of averages. The hardest part of this for students is not calculating these, but instead we are sometimes given the mean, and then asked to find a missing value. Students must work backwards to find the mean in this case. Please see the presentation below for how to do this. 

Mean, Median, Mode

Christmas Activities

Next week, we will be doing a number of activities for Christmas in our class.

First of all, on Wednesday, we will be watching the "Polar Express" and having a morning of hot chocolate.

On Thursday, we will be making gingerbread houses in the morning class, and determining the area, and surface area of the houses before building. For these, if possible, please send in a few peanut free candies that we can use for decorations. I will be supplying icing and graham crackers, and a few candies, but I am sure we will need more. Thank you!

On Friday, we will have our Christmas concert in the gym. It will begin at 10:50. Our class will be near the end because they generally go in order by grade.

Also on Friday, the afternoon class will be making gingerbread houses with our Kinder buddies. Nothing is required, as we have asked the kinder parents to donate some candy as we will let the little ones take home the gingerbread houses.

Thank you, and I hope everyone is enjoying the Christmas Season!

Holy Trinity Parent Information Night

Link to PDF file

Summarizing & The Story of Exodus

As part of our unit on Self-Monitoring in Language, we have been learning how to show that we have a good understanding of the text we read by writing summaries. In class, we read the story of Exodus in our religion books, and then wrote a summary of the story in partners. We wrote our summaries in Padlet, and I gave students the option of simply telling a summary using We Video. I was surprised that all the students decided to write their summary rather than use We Video! Not everyone had a chance to finish, but here is a link to the Padlet:

Exodus Padlet

Next, we reviewed how to write a good summary, because many of the summaries in the Padlet were very long. I try to explain to students that a retell is when you tell a story with a fair amount of detail, and a summary is when you tell the story with only the most important parts. 

A good rule of thumb is to ask yourself, "If I leave this part out, will the story still make sense?"

If the answer is yes, then it is probably not overly important. If the answer is no, then it is very important to the story. 

Our next step is to write summaries of the Exodus story individually, and check that students are able to limit the summary to only the most important ideas. This can be very challenging for students, because they want to write the story in a great amount of detail to show what they know. We will be working on this for this week and next, before moving on to our next unit.