Monday, February 13, 2017

Snow Days!

We have to extend a HUGE thank you to our FAP members for helping to bring the amazing Natalie Kinsey Warnock to our school. She was so energetic and full of incredible stories. After she left our classrooms were abuzz with talk of how students were going to start collecting their own memories to write about. Thanks for this rich experience!

Students have been hard at work gathering research on their passion project topics. Now they will begin to organize their research using headings/subheadings into different google slides by topic. Then they will write using some of the nonfiction text features we learned about while studying the works of author, Steve Jenkins. Lastly, students will present their research projects to you on the morning of Thursday, March 9th. The time is still to be announced, but we usually like to start early in the morning to make it possible to stop and see you child's work on the way to work. More detailed information will be coming home at the end of this week.

In last week's Friday folder you received a letter from our wonderful colleague, Susan Stewart. Susan will be traveling to Africa over the Winter Break to visit the Hands of Love Educational Centre . She is looking for certain items that these students and teachers could benefit from and will be collecting them right up until the break outside of the Equinox doors. You can also bring any contributions to Mosaic and we would be happy to send them down to Susan to take on her journey.

Thank for all that you do to support our work,


Sunday, February 5, 2017

Passionate People

We wrapped up the reading portion of our nonfiction unit by nominating one of Steve Jenkins books for a fictional award inspired by the Orbis Pictus medal for nonfiction. The readers had to use what they know about text structures (i.e. question/answer, cause/effect, chronological, narrative, etc.) and Jenkins use of text features as criteria for their award. See this week's Let's Recap for some of the books they chose and their reasoning behind it.

Now we have moved into the writing portion of the unit where students will use what they know about text structures and features of nonfiction text to research and write an informational piece about a topic of their choice. The choices they have made range from spicy peppers to snub nosed monkeys and everything in between. We have jumped into notetaking and next week we will use Google Slides to begin to organize our notes with headings. Then students will decide on which structural elements they will include. Maybe they will choose to have a vocabulary section, a question and answer text box, side bars, diagrams, or endnotes. We can't wait to share our Passion Projects with you when we return from the Winter Break. An invite for our Passion Project breakfast will be sent home next week.

We wrapped up our math unit last week and students self-assessed their growth. Many of them were so proud of themselves for how much they grew in developing efficient strategies for multi-digit addition and subtraction and using estimation and rounding to support a reasonable solution. Now we are moving into Unit 4 where students will be learning about measurement of time, mass and volume and beginning to explore fractions. Read here to learn more about the math concepts in this unit.

Also this week we are excited to welcome Vermont author Natalie Kinsey-Warnock. She will be visiting all of the 3/4 teams for an interactive and in-depth look at her writing process. Look forward to some pictures after her visit next week!

Please remember to have your child bring all of their winter gear to school and expect to change into some more comfortable shoes upon arrival. Our rugs are taking a beating from the salty/sandy boots!