Dear Parents,
As we finish another week in the classroom, I wanted to give an overview of what we've been working on:
This week students completed an artist statement based on their Kandisky work from last week in Art and we practiced a new improv game called Bippity Bippity Bop for drama.
In Gym, we've been working on co-operative games, mostly using the parachute this week, and we started our Health curriculum with a discussion about reasons people eat (Medical, Social, Societal, Emotional).
We began our Social Studies program by talking about Orange Shirt Day and some of the Push/Pull Factors for Immigration to Canada. When we talked about symbols that represented Canada, a lot of the students chose animals. When we talked about things that represented their own family's arrival to Canada, many chose to focus on cultural foods, like pierogies or potatoes. These are valid choices, but when we talked about Orange Shirt Day and the challenges that Black Loyalists faced, I felt like students engaged in the bigger ideas that ground our unit, so I hope to move forward with that. We'll be doing some of that through partnering with Ms. Khokar in the Library.
For Language, we read together from the class novel and they wrote a reading response based on a shared discussion question. For writing, they handed in a polished copy of a paragraph to show their understanding of paragraph structure, and we are busy making pop-up book pages in groups to explain some grammar terms like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and punctuation. I will start sending home grammar homework for practice next week.
For math, we've been working through the Nelson textbook in Patterning and Algebra, with support from JUMP math. Now that our new workbooks have arrived, I hope to do more work with the JUMP program. Today, we worked on the mid-unit quiz from JUMP, which will go home Monday along with the homework--another practice quiz. I sat with all my math groups today to review their understanding of the trickier patterns that change (Patterns that go up by a new number each time are harder to make algebraic rules to move from x to y, so we might use t-charts or pictures to support.). I will continue to send home math homework to be completed by Friday, on a weekly basis.
I also have been giving them quizzes to see where their computation skills are. For students who need to practice, the following sites have been recommended to me by Ms. Filan for good math games:
https://pages.sumdog.com/
https://ca.ixl.com/math/grade-6
https://www.brainpop.com/math/
We're using yellow folders to communicate back and forth from home, to write out our agendas, and to stay organized. We're spending time daily, reviewing those organizational details, to help students get in good habits for their future.
Sincerely,
Ms. Goegan
