A morning of superheroes!

This morning we discovered that practicing multiples in Math is SUPER!

What a fun way to start the day!

*****

Agenda items:

1. Mme Careen forgot to correct Section B of our call mental with us this morning. Oopsie!

We will now correct Section B Monday morning in Math.

2. Forgot to bring in your donation for Terry? Don't worry! It's not too late! 

Donations will still be accepted next week. Please give as you are able.

Have a great weekend! :)

Terry Fox Friday!

What a beautiful day for a Terry Fox run!
We came ready to run/walk and together as a school we carried on Terry's Marathon of Hope.
Each $ donated and each km counted will all make a world of difference!
Way to go Knights!

http://likesuccess.com/img3328135

A few reminders for tomorrow

Happy Thursday, everyone!

Agenda items for today:

1. Section B Calcul Mental due tomorrow

2. Terry Fox Walk/Run tomorrow periods 3 and 4!

Wear Knights colours and/or your favourite running/walking costumes!

Please bring in a $1 donation (or please share what you are able) to help us continue on with Terry Fox's legacy of having each Canadian donate $1 to help fund cancer research.

https://politelysmiling.wordpress.com/2013/04/12/a-hero-ran-among-us/

*****

P.S. Here's a quick peek at us working in Science today.

Please ask me about what groups and subgroups my group created for our dichotomous key (clé dichotomique) about Methods of Transportation.

It's Wednesday! 😃

We started our morning with Math - and Ms. Woodcroft was our teacher! SO fun!

We reviewed what we've learned so far about multiples by playing a Multiples game with a partner.

Please ask me about it!

Next, in Science, we debriefed on how our classification activity went in class yesterday and added more process and cons to our list about classification systems.

Pro: Creating them (classification keys) help us become better problem solvers.

Con: Sometimes it is hard to create groups and subgroups that accommodate a specific group of objects.

In Français, we started with our daily reading. Today we combined the first two LAs and we all read so well!

After our reading time was up, we continued with our daily mini-grammar lesson and then got back to reading 

our Terry Fox article.

We started with the"Questionner" section of "les 4 fantastiques" and came up with another prediction about the article. We then listened as Mme Careen read us the remaining three paragraphs, stopping after each one to discuss the main points/ideas. We learned SO much about Terry Fox and his goals today!

*****

Agenda items:

1. Section B Calcul Mental - due Friday

2. 1$ for Terry Fox. Thank you to all who have already so generously donated!

3. Start brainstorming ideas for our personal goals for our grade 6 school year. 

(More info about this - our first writing assignment in FC - smoking soon!)

Have a great afternoon everyone! :)

Rainy Day Tuesday

Hello everyone!

Please read on to see what we were up to at school this morning:

In Mathé, we continue working on multiples and have started noticing patterns that help us determine if a certain number is a multiple of another number.

For example, we have already noticed that numbers ending in zero are multiples of both 5 and 10, and numbers that are multiples of 2 need to be even (ending in 0,2,4,6,8).

In Science, we started the class with a discussion about the pros and cons of classification systems and then worked in teams of 3 to sort a set of items and create a dichotomous key (more about the latter tomorrow). We noticed that some of our items fell easily into groups while others were a bit harder to sort, forcing us, at times, to re-think the groups and subgroups we had already started with.

In Français, we continued on with our Terry Fox article that we began discussing in class yesterday. Following 

"les 4 fantastiques" - a reading strategy that we will be using quite a lot this school year - we made a prediction about what we thought the article would be about and had to include WHY we thought it. If we do not back up our predictions with a reason (proof) we are simply making a guess.

Stay tuned to see what connections we will be making with this article as the week continues.

*****

Agenda items:

1. Section A of Lecon 23 (Cut and Paste Zeros) is due tomorrow (Wed.)

2. Donations for our upcoming Terry Fox Run/Walk are being accepted all week. 

Please give what you are able!

Have a nice afternoon! 

☔ Stay dry! ☔

Welcome Week 3!

Happy Monday everyone!

We kicked off week 3 with the introduction of our first Mental math strategy: 

Cutting and Pasting Zeros! 

Ex: 3000 x 5, becomes 3 x 5 when we "cut" the zeros.

We then multiply 3 x 5 = 15, and then paste the zeros, to get 15 000!

We started off with a class lesson before taking time for independent practice.

After correcting 10 practice questions together as class, students were assigned Section A (20 questions) as independent practice that they'll work on between now and Wednesday.

In Français, after working on our daily grammar lesson, we started making predications about a Terry Fox article we will be reading as a class this week. Reading the article will not only serve as a celebration of Terry Fox's accomplishments as we approach our Terry Fox School Walk/Run day this Friday, but will also serve as a model for our first writing assignment that we'll be starting in class later this week.

In Science today, we wrote the definition of "un système de classification" before we took time to share the examples of classification systems we found as part of our homework last week.

We came up with so many great examples!

We find classification/organization systems: at the library (books by subject, the Dewey system), at the supermarket (similar foods grouped together), here at school (academic classes), our clothes at home (a drawer each for socks, pants, shirts), our kitchens (cutlery, plates, bowls) and the dictionary

(words by alphabetical order).

Tomorrow we will continue our discussions about classification and discuss the pros and cons of having a 

system in place.

*****

Agenda items:

1. Section A Calcul Mental - Wednesday

2. Terry Fox Run: Please consider donating $1 (or donating what you are able) to Terry's dream of having each Canadian donate $1 in a effort to find a cure for cancer. More info about our Terry Fox Walk/Run to follow soon.

Wishing you all a great week ahead! :)

That's a Wrap - Week 2!

Happy Friday, everyone!

We got straight to work in Math this morning and started learning about multiples.
A multiple is a number that contains another number many times.

Ex: The first 10 multiples of 5: 5, 10, 15, 20, 25, 30, 35, 40, 45, 50

We then chose the number 20, and discussed, "20 is a multiple of which numbers?" and had to explain HOW we knew.

We will continue learning about multiples in class next week.

In Français, we had Freebie Friday; a chance to choose either LA - Lecture Autonome, or LA - Lecture Avec Partenaire. Many of us took advantage of our ever-growing classroom library and got straight to reading!

After reading, we corrected one sentence from our "On corrige" booklet and then we spent the last part of our morning together discussing how Knights are Learners (les apprenants), the last category of our three classroom beliefs. Now that we have reviewed all of our ideas as a class, Mme will combine all of our thoughts and create classroom belief statements for us to review and sign next week.

*****

Agenda reminders:
Choir today at 12:10 in Room 212
Grade 6/7 Boys Volleyball and parent meeting after school today
Drama starts next week - see Mme McKenzie for more info
Tier 2 Girls Volleyball Monday at 7:30am
Atomic Boys Volleyball Monday at 12:15
3rd Cross Country Meet - Monday at 4:15 at GWMS.

** Looking to find all upcoming activities all in one place? Visit the calendar on our school's website. A link directly to the calendar has been added to this blog - the first link under the "Helpful Websites" heading found on the righthand side of the page. **

Have a great weekend! :)

Thinking Classroom and Curious George

Happy Thursday, everyone!

Here's a look at what we were up to this morning.

We started our morning together in randomized groups at the white boards working through a series of "One of These Things is Not Like the Others" cards. When working at the whiteboard, we work in teams of 3 and only have 1 marker to share per group. This puts the focus on discussing and collaborating on an answer WITH our group rather than having three individuals in a group each working alongside one another without any collaboration at all.

 We worked with our groups to identify which number or picture was not like the other three and had to back up our reasons with "mathematical proof." The 'trick' to these questions is that there just isn't one correct answer; there can be many different answers found in one set of pictures.

Please ask me about what types of numbers and pictures my group and I worked on and what we came up with!

We are continuing our daily reading with a partner. Next week we will start combining our first two "LAs" together, with half of the class reading independently while the other half reads with a partner.

We ended our morning in Science, which included watching a short episode of Curious George!

We have started discussing different classification systems that we see in our daily lives, and Curious George helping out at his local library was the perfect example of how a group of objects (in this case, books) can be organized in many different ways. Not all organization systems are created equal, and each system can have advantages and disadvantages.

We applied what we learned in the video to how we sorted ourselves in class yesterday. How many different ways can we group our classmates? What specific questions can we ask to classify objects into groups that become more and more specific?

We'll continue applying this concept in class next week.

Have a great afternoon! :)

*****

Agenda items for today:

Half way, Week 2!

We started our morning in Math and we had a chance to share our wonderfully creative title pages with each other. We learned so many fun facts about each other today!

In Français we continued our "Lecture avec Partenaire" and also our mini grammar lessons. 

We also took time out to review our class beliefs (that we started working on last week) and talked a lot about what we would believe a respectful classroom should look like. We will continue our discussions over the next couple of days.

We ended the morning with another sorting activity in Science and this time we sorted... OURSELVES! We started in a big group and asked specific yes/no questions or questions with two distinct answers in order to break up into smaller groups. During the activity, we learned about the importance of being very specific with the questions we ask and we also discovered that coming up with criteria to classify objects (ourselves) isn't always easy.

After some negotiating, this is how we ended up grouping ourselves. 

(Please excuse the messy writing. Mme Careen was writing so quickly to keep up with our great ideas!)

We also agreed that this wasn't the only option... we could start over again from the top and end up with very different looking groups if we asked different questions along the way.

*****

Agenda reminders:

1. Scholastics orders due Friday.

2. Atomic Volleyball tomorrow at 12:15 in gym

3. Cross Country Meet #2 tomorrow at GWMS at 4:15

4. Drama, drama, drama! Interested in being a part of the school's drama program? 

See Mme McKenzie (in Room 209) for an information letter. Practices start Monday of next week.

Have a great afternoon! :)

Tuesday!

Hello, Hello!

We had another great morning of learning together!

Mme Marcoux, our Resource teacher and Guidance Counsellor, came to visit us this morning and asked us to complete a survey about how things are going so far for us here at Ness. Mme Marcoux will read our answers to get to know us better and to check in with us if again soon to make sure things are still going well.

In Science, we started our "Diversity of Living Things" unit with a sorting activity. Students worked in randomized teams of 4 to place a bag of miscellaneous objects into groups with a commonality. We then compared how each team classified their objects and were surprised to see how many different object groups were created. We then went back to our objects groups to see how we could further separate them (splitting a group into a subgroup). 

Please ask me about what objets were in the bag and how my group divided them!

Lots of things coming up at school this week:

1. Meet the Teacher BBQ after school today!

2. Cross Country practice tomorrow morning 8:00am

3. Choir practice tomorrow morning at 7:45

4. Tier 2 volleyball teams practice tomorrow morning at 7:30

5. School newspaper meeting tomorrow at 12:10 in Room 101.

6. Atomic Level Volleyball starts at 12:15 tomorrow in the gym.

 Phew! We're going to be a busy bunch this year! :)

Happy Monday!

We're recharged from the weekend and ready to kick off the second week of school!
Here's a quick look at what we were up to today!

We started our morning in Phys Ed - Fitness Monday! - and then headed up for Math. After being "interrupted" for our first Fire Drill practice of the year, we got to work! Today we worked on a "Numbers All About Me" title page in our notebook. After writing our name in the centre of the page, we divided the rest of the page up into sections, filling each with a number expressing something about us. Birthdays, number of siblings, age, house number, personal record of how many pizza slices we ate in one sitting.... the options are endless!

We will finish our title pages in class tomorrow before presenting them in groups to our class friends.

In Français, we started the second "La" of our "LaLaLa;" reading with a partner! Reading with a partner offers us a chance to read aloud to someone and also hear someone read to us. It allows us to practice our pronunciation, fluidity and expression. We will continue reading with a partner for the next few days before being introduced to the last "La."

It's going to be a great week for learning! Stay tuned to see what we'll be up to! :)

***
Agenda items/reminders:
- Scholastic orders due Friday
- Meet the Teacher BBQ tomorrow (Tuesday) from 4:30-6:00
- Good luck to our Cross Country runners in the first meet after school today. Any students interested in joining Cross Country are invited to come out to practice tomorrow morning at 8:00am.

What a great first week!

Happy Friday!
We have officially made it through the first week of school! Hooray!

We had a busy morning of learning together. Here's a look at what we were up to.

We started our morning with a formative mental math assessment and it made our brains work SO hard! We had twenty minutes to answer as many questions as we could (there were 50 questions in total). Mme Careen will use this assessment to plan what mental math strategies we will be starting with this year.

Next in Français we started off with our 10 minutes of "Lecture Autonome" before moving on to our
"On corrige" grammar lesson.

We ended our morning with a team challenge in Science. We worked in our table groups to build a free-standing structure using 20 pieces of dry spaghetti, 1 m of tape and one marshmallow. 

We only had 16 minutes to create the tallest structure we could.

We had many successes and failures with our designs and learned that having a plan before getting started is a good idea. We had a great time collaborating with our classmates and are looking forward to our next team challenge, which could pop up at any time...!

Have a great weekend, everyone!

*****

A few reminders about upcoming activities.

So much learning!

Happy Thursday, everyone!

In Math this morning we learned a new Math game to help us practice our multiplication facts!

It was good to share off a bit of the dust that settled on our Math brains over the summer.

In Français, we again took time for "LA" - Lecture Autonome.

We also reviewed a new "féminin" lesson as part of our daily grammar review.

We also heard from a few more of our classmates about their favourite book! 

There is such a great variety of genres and we are so passionate when we explain why our favourite books 

are our favourites!

We finished our morning with a quick review of all the exciting activity options that are coming up in the next few days. There are SO many ways to get involved at school here at Ness!

Vive les Chevaliers!

Getting used to our new routines!

Happy Wednesday, everyone!

It's already the fourth day of school and we are getting more settled into our new school
and new school routines every day!

We started our day with a Tangrams challenge in Math. Working in randomized groups of 2 or 3, we were tasked with creating 3 different shapes using 7 shapes. It was not as easy as we thought!

Next, in Français, we started with "LALALA." What is that?! LALALA is a daily literacy activity that has students reading individually, with a partner and in a group with a teacher (Mme Careen). This will be done for 10 minutes at the beginning of every Français class. We started today with "Lecture Autonome" (reading individually) and will introduce the next "La" - Lecture Avec Partenaire (reading with a partner) - 

early next week.

After reading, we moved on to our next daily Français routine: On Corrige.
Each day we will review/learn a new grammar rule to help us improve our writing en français. We will then look at one or two sentences that are full of mistakes and work as a class to correct them.
The booklets that we are working from will become a part of our "Guide de référence" duotangs that will be left in class and serve as a working reference tool whenever we are working on our writing in class.

We ended our morning by reading the book "As-tu rempli un seau aujourd'hui" which kicked off our discussion on classroom beliefs for the school year.

After discussing the statements: Knights are respectful, Knights are responsible and Knights are learners, we all had a chance to add our ideas of what that might look like for us in our classroom this year. We wrote our ideas on post-it notes and added them to three sheets of chart paper posted on the board. We will review our ideas at the beginning of class tomorrow and continue to add to our ideas until we feel that all of our views and beliefs of what it is to be a Knight are represented.
Stay tuned to see what we come up with! :)

***
Agenda items for today:
1) First Cross Country practice tomorrow (Thursday) morning at 8:00am.
More information available from Mme Careen or the office.
2) First meeting for any students interested in participating in Drama this year at school: Tomorrow (Thursday) at 12:10 in Mme McKenzie's room (Room 209).
3) First Note Night for band students tomorrow (Thursday) evening.
4) Scholastic orders due Friday, September 22.
5) Ask me about what I most enjoyed at school this morning!

It's Tuesday!

We started our day with a quiz! Yikes!

Turns out it was a pretty silly T/F quiz about Mme Careen... phew!

Did you know, for example, that Mme Careen has been to Newfoundland 11 times and does NOT like eating chocolate marshmallow Santas? Ha! Now you know! :)

After finishing our quiz, we spent time learning more about each other. We started with a Smarties sharing activity, with each colour of Smartie representing one thing we needed to share about ourselves.

After our Smarties sharing activity, we got to work creating our own T/F quizzes! Some of us came up with some pretty tricky questions to stump our classmates and we were all able to share some fun facts about ourselves!

After locker break, we tackled one of Mme Careen's favourite activities - Les gratte-ciels (Skyscrapers)! After being divided into randomized groups of two or three, we worked together to solve as many 'puzzles' as we could. 

The time flew by!

A collection of our favourite books!

We once again ended our morning outside sharing our favourite books with each other. It is so wonderful to hear everyone's choices and explanations!

We certainly had a great morning together!
Who knows what we'll be up to tomorrow?! ☺

Agenda items for September 12

Happy Monday!

Hello everyone!

Our morning together flew by as we spent our time getting organized for the year and
learning more about each other.

After doing a "Trouve quelqu'un qui..." activity and getting our binders, duotangs and scribblers organized, we spent the last bit of our morning outside sharing our about our favourite books!
How wonderful to see so many books and hear so many different reasons why we love to read them!
We ran short of sharing time this morning, but will certainly continue our discussions tomorrow!

Wishing you all a wonderful week! ☺

Agenda items for Monday, September 11

What a great first day!

Happy Friday!

We had a busy first day at school and had a great time getting to know each other this morning! The time flew by as we: practiced our handshakes, attended our first school-wide assembly, practiced lining up for both the bus and a fire drill and took a tour of the school. Phew!

We also celebrated International Literacy Day by listening to Mme Careen read us two of her favourite picture books: Pat le Chat J'adore aller à l'école and Hungry Bird.

We ended our morning together by taking our first day of school class picture; one of Mme Careen's favourite first day of school traditions! :)

What a GREAT looking group of Knights!

Wishing you all a safe, sunny and relaxing weekend!
We're SO excited to be back at school! :)

First Day of School Agenda Items!

Looking forward to seeing all of you tomorrow! :)

Bonjour! Bienvenue!

Hello and Welcome Families of Homeroom 208!

It was so wonderful meeting all of you at our Triad Conferences and I am very much looking forward to a
great year of learning together!

While you are here, please take a minute to FOLLOW our classroom blog. It's super easy!
Type your email address in the box under "FOLLOW BY EMAIL" found on the righthand menu bar and
then click "SUBMIT." That's it! :)

When you are one of our Blog Followers, you will receive an email whenever a new post has been added to our classroom blog, which will allow you to keep up to date with all that we are doing here in Room 208!

Wishing you all a great first day of Grade 6!
See you (les élèves!) on Friday! :)