News Articles, Social Media Safety & Volume

This past week was busy! On Monday, we celebrated Family Literacy Day by learning  about News Article writing. Thank you to all parents and family members who were able to join us for the lesson. I hope you enjoyed it. We continued writing our News Articles throughout the week and on Friday did an EQAO practice sample in which students had to write a news article with the headline "New Creature Discovered by Students". We will look at examples of levels 1 through 4 this week and students will self-assess their work. As part of our guided and independent work time, I will ask students to try to re-write their news articles to "bump it up" to the next level by looking at the exemplars to help them.

We have also been learning a little bit about Social Media Safety over the last couple of weeks, and this week we did a short online quiz about what we learned. In the quiz, I asked for students to write their name, and many thought this was a trick question, because we have learned not to give personal information (including your first and last name) out over the internet. I was happy to see that they were able to apply their learning so well!

Next, we will be moving on to learning the reading skill of "Making Connections". We will learn that when we read, it help us to understand if we can make connections to the text we are reading, such as connecting it to ourselves, the world, or other texts we have read (or perhaps seen - like a movie). We will be reading a book called "Ryan and Jimmy and the Well in Africa that Brought Them Together". This is a story about Ryan Herljack, a young man who began raising money to build wells in Africa when he was only in Grade 1. We are lucky this year because Ryan is coming to visit our school soon to speak to our students about his Foundation. This is an excellent story, and I am sure students will greatly enjoy it and be able to make many connections to it after meeting Ryan in person.

In math, we have been learning about surface area of both rectangular and triangular prisms. Students generally seem to be getting this, but we will be continuing to practice this week, along with finding the volume of both these shapes. This week we will be finding the optimal amount of packaging for a chocolate bar, and later finding out how many cubic centimeters will fit in a cubic meter. See this blog post for some examples of how to find surface area.

Finally, in science we have just begun learning about Space for the grade 6's and Conservation of Energy for the grade 5's. We have started with students preparing a google slide about the parts of the solar system and the forms of energy, which they will then import in to a program called peardeck, so they can create some questions and other activities in order for their presentations to be more interactive.