Ask Me About...- We were assigned a clan animal and are making a flag to represent what is important about our clan animal in Science. - We started a collaborative art piece for the Art Auction. We all used oil pastels to make a rectangle. - We started our Options this week! In the Movement Group we used chairs as our partners and have to use Up, Out, In, Around in our piece.In animation we are making animations about the food chain, saving a wetland using stop motion. That means we move and take a picture, move and talk a picture. In Art Intervention we developed a question wetlands and are working toward showing our idea better. using magazines, paper, posters, printed images. We could choose to show how humans impact a wetland. Some of us also compared wetlands with other environments/ecosystems. - In Fine Arts, we are starting to make our clown routine that we will be sharing later in the year. - We found out that Ophelia was given a wish to grant in our novel Granted. - Math - we are still developing our division skills and we started to look for angles that are acute (less than 90˚) Right (90˚) and Obtuse (greater than 90˚ but less than 180˚) - We are making a mural to show what plants and animals live in different zones of a pond wetland. We will be wrting about the interactions in our zones once our murals are complete. - We taught our Buddies how to play Multiplication Battleship. - W learned a new game in gym - "Dragon's Jewels" and we played Rambo Dodgeball again. - The Grade Six Farewell Theme is ..... Riverdale (1950s diner) Upcoming- Student Led Conferences are on Friday. Please book at time to have your child share what they have learned this year.
Ask Me About... Fine Arts: Message from Mr. Symington An element of "clowning" that students are exploring in Fine Arts is "slapstick". Students will be given the choice to not participate in this section. Please note that students will never physically grab, pull, slap each other. It is an illusion. They will be participating in an open frame workshop with demos followed by practice:
Students are applying at least two of a slap, fall, hair pull or kick to a short scene. It is being stressed to students that during rehearsal that they ensure there is a reason for slapstick, as it shouldn’t be there unless it is needed. The main criteria is that Slapstick should never be used with extreme aggression in clowning, it should always be whimsical and playful. - We started a new book - Granted. Its about a fairy named Ophelia who is a perfectionist, wish granter. Through this book, we are learning to find evidence of character traits and to think about how characters grow and change. - We had an African drumming session, thanks to our Parent Council for supporting this! - We started a science unit about wetlands. So far, we have learned what they are and some different types of wetlands We have been looking at infographics to gather information to help us decide why they are important. We are also looking at living and non-living things and the interactions between them. - On Monday, we are starting our curricular options exploring concepts about wetlands. Choices for students are: animation, movement, and art intervention. We will have an assembly on April 27 to share our learning with you. - In social studies, we are starting to learn about the governments structure in the Iroquois Confederacy - or Haudenosaunee. - We continue to learn how to divide. Some of us are learning how to divide numbers with decimals while others are working to represent division situations with manipulatives and then record our strategies numerically. This will lead us to paper and pencil strategies. Check out the division games that are on our Links page. - We checked to see which multiplication and/or division facts we know or have strategies for. Some of us are really confident with efficient strategies while others have set goals to learn 5 more facts for next week. - We played Rambo dodgeball and will be starting a soccer unit in gym. - We chose one of the writing prompts that we had started last week to develop into a finished piece. Through an Author's Chair - students who choose to read their writing are getting feedback and ideas from their peers. Students can choose to share with the whole class or with a small group. -In literacy we are still working on writing our main event with a balance of thoughts, actions, dialogue and description. We highlighted each of these with different colours to see visually whether we had actually included and balance all 4. Then we set goals for our next steps. These will be finished next week and then we will learn to write satisfying endings. - We completed a CBE survey about our learning opportunities and experiences. Upcoming...- Curriculum options start next week.
- We continue to develop our efficiency with multiplication and division facts and strategies. We also will begin to look at measuring angles. - Ms. Huzzar will be spending more time in our classroom over the next 6 weeks, while Mrs. Austman works with other teachers in the school around our School Development Plan goals. Ask Me About...- We worked on our insect/bird/bat research - to find out how they fly. This is due the Thursday after our break. - We started soccer in gym. - We finished The Girl Who Owned A City ... In the end, Lisa got her city back, Craig and Erica stayed on the farm and Lisa let Tom Logan go. - We continued to learn about ways to divide. Some of us are still working on subtraction with regrouping. - We went back to our Air - Initial Thinking and added what we know now. - We interviewed our buddies about their tipi projects. - We tried to make a decision by consensus. It was super hard, chaotic and even a disaster according to some. We learned that it is hard to think of group needs over our own. - In literacy we are working on the Main Event of our story. - we figured out which multiplication facts we know. Upcoming ....- Bird project - due Thurs. April 5
- we need to learn 5 multiplication facts that we don't already know. Those Ask Me About...
Upcoming...- Parent Teacher Conferences are on Thursday afternoon/evening and Friday morning. Please book through your My CBE Account. Students are encouraged to attend. There is no school Thursday afternoon or Friday.
- Bird research projects are due Thursday. Criteria (Bird Research Success Criteria) and a partial sample (How Do Peregrine Falcon's Fly?) are in our Shared Room 7 folder. Ask Me About...- We wrote a science quiz about the control surfaces... some of us know them, some of us still need more practice. - We started to think about division ... we are using mental math strategies to make connections to multiplication and different division strategies in our number talks. - Most of us are finished our opinion paragraphs about whether Athens was fair. This will need to be finished Monday during Work on Work time if it isn't already complete. - We started an art project where we are drawing 4 different animal views. - We filmed the "pay it forward" kindness video that we are producing as a result of our conversations on Pink Shirt Day. We will start editing next week. - In The Girl Who Owned a City, Lisa's house burned down and she was devastated. She moped around for a bit until she noticed that the kids at Jill's house needed something different. She thought that they need to fix the problems they have right now and not dream of things that they won't be able to achieve, yet! - We are starting to learn about the Iroquois Confederacy as another historical model of democracy. We are reading the book, Hiawatha and the Peacemaker, the story of how 6 different First Nations joined in peace to form the Iroquois Confederacy. - We read the picture book, Nerdy Birdy Tweets, to help us think about cyberbullying and why posting pictures of others without their permission, is not good Internet citizenship. The story also has a sub-theme of 'sorry doesn't fix everything.' - In literacy, we have been adding suspense to our story beginnings using the "magic of three" technique. We use 'red flag words' to introduce a hint that something will happen. In the first hint, the main character reacts, but dismisses what they sensed, the second hint is of a greater intensity or involves a different sense. The character demonstrates a deeper reaction. On the third hint, which is also of greater intensity, something is discovered or revealed. - We watched Hannaraptor, an opera by the Calgary Opera. It was a story about family, a rare fossil find, and making choices. Although the Hannaraptor was not a real dinosaur and the story was fiction, it was based upon a real fossil find. We learned about different opera voices and although we weren't sure we would, most of us liked it. Upcoming...- We will be having another Work On Work/Board Games time on Monday.
- Please remember to change your clocks ahead this weekend. - March 22 and 23 are Parent Teacher Conferences. Please watch for more information about booking next week. Ask Me About...- We wore Pink Shirts on Wednesday to support anti-bullying. We decorated our classroom and thought about what #niceneedsnofilter meant. This brought us to a conversation around cyberbullying, our online presence, and privacy...specifically about sharing photos of ourselves and personal information online. - after watching a video about Act of Kindness we decided to make our own video for Belfast and are in the process of planning it. - We built airplanes, and tested them. We experimented with the control surfaces to learn how each surface would affect the movement of the plane. We postponed our quiz until Tuesday since we spent so much time improving our planes. - We are learning decimal multiplication, subtraction with regrouping in math. We are also learning to organize our mathematical thinking and developing strategies to clearly prove our process. - in The Girl Who Owned A City, our read aloud novel, a gang wanted Lisa to give them her food in exchange for protection. She refused because she knew about a warehouse that would provide them with food for at least a year and the children of her street are creating their own militia to protect themselves. Some of us think that the image on the front cover is the warehouse burning. - We completed the edits of our Panda Passage news article using the Word Referent and Just the Facts techniques that we learned last week. - We read the first few pages of a wordless book called Quest. We learned that WOW story beginnings include a sound effect, action, description, or character's thought or description. They should start right at the problem and in the first paragraph the reader should know the characters, the setting, and the problem. After rehearsing our ideas, through telling them to others, we wrote our own beginnings to the story and are having our peers check that we have included all of the success criteria. - We wrote a Ancient Athens quiz. Everyone knew the class structure and most students were able to identify components of the Ancient Athenian government. As I met individually with students about their results, they many were able to prove they actually understood questions they had answered incorrectly. This was a perfect opportunity to focused on strategies for reading and answering multiple choice questions! Upcoming...- Tuesday - Flight Quiz
- We will continue to develop strategies for writing an opinion piece about whether or not Ancient Athenian democracy was fair. - We will focus on developing the middle of our story as we learn to balance thoughts, actions, dialogue, and characters' thoughts and descriptions. Ask Me About...- Child Care Tax Receipts came home today - We went to SpacePort to learn about how airplanes fly and properties of air. - In The Girl Who Owned A City, we know that there are no more adults. Lisa is 10 and her brother, Todd, is 5. They are trying to make an alliance of kids to protect themselves from the gangs. She also learned how to drive a car so she could get more items instead of the wagon. - We are continuing to learn to multiply decimals in math. - We learned about the surfaces that control a planes movement and will have a quiz on Tuesday. - We are finishing our Day in the Life of and our review of Ancient Athens. We also started to plan an opinion piece of writing where we will answer the question, "Is the democracy of Ancient Athens fair?" - We have been learning some strategies to edit our news articles. We learned to use different nouns and to add adjectives instead of writing panda over and over and over! We also learned to take a"Just The Facts" statement and add "what it looks like" and "why it is important" to expand our sentences. We will continue this work next week. Upcoming- we have an Ancient Athens quiz on Tuesday
- we have a Control Surfaces quiz - Wednesday is Pink Shirt Day - we are wearing pink shirts for an anti-bullying day. for more information go towww.pinkshirtday.ca/ - Book orders due Friday! Ask Me About...-We started a new book called The Girl Who Owned A City. It is connected to our study of government and democracy. - We have been doing Daily Math which is practicing 3 multiplication questions of our choice (at our just right level) each day. The goal for grade 5s is to be able to multiply 2 -digit by 2-digit numbers and for grade 6s to multiply with decimals (1-digit whole multipliers). - Today was Valentines' Day. We all wore red, white, and or pink and some students chose to bring Valentines for our classmates. - We performed our Properties of Air movement piece at our Tuesday afternoon assembly. - We watched the launch of the Falcon Heavy and have begun an exploration of rockets. We are comparing how rockets get lift and thrust, how they are controllable in space where there is no air, and how this compares to airplanes that need air to create lift. - We went back to our Science quiz about properties of air and answered the questions that we didn't know yet last time. We continue to develop our growth mindset skills as we go back to questions that we didn't know the first time. Knowing about how air can be compressed and better understanding how differences in air pressure affect movement helped us all to demonstrate stronger understanding of the concepts. - We are working on our Day in the Life... of a citizen, metic, or slave to better understand the social structure of Ancient Athens. - We started an Ancient Athens review - where we each answered a question and used a simultaneous learning strategy to shared and extend our understandings. This will help us with the quiz we will be writing on Tuesday,February 27. - We are starting to multiply decimals. - Today we had our Work On Work (WOW) time where students finished up assignments from the week that hadn't been completed yet. Students who were finished brought board games to play. Many are students beginning to accept responsibility for completing unfinished work at lunch or at home so that they can participate. Upcoming...- Monday - Family Day
- Thursday - SpacePort field trip - Friday - Work On Work/boardgames for students who are finished all of their work. Ask me about...- DJD came to our school and we had a performance this morning and afterward the students reflected on their experience The grade 5 performance was to the quote: "There's freedom waiting for you in the breezes of the sky and you ask what if I fall, but my darling, what if you fly?" Jadah reflected: "I think that the quote really goes with the dance because the quote is very airy and the dance is light and airy and wavy." "I think that this poem is about being able to take the extra step when you are at your lowest point," Preslie wrote. The following quote, framed the grade 6 performance. "and what do the flower buds pushing up from the broken earth say about you? we break to grow." ~ pavana Cadence reflected, "When I did the dance it changed my way of thinking about it. I now think it means we can grow further, the more we work on it." - We are on the last chapter of In Over Their Heads. The entire book, all 49 chapters has happened in two days! It's been very busy. - We had an Athenian court where Mrs. Austman charged Mr. Symington with stealing her whiteboard markers. The jury decide he was guilty, but they didn't banish him because that didn't fit the crime. His sentence is to pay Mrs. Austman $1 per marker that he takes out of the room. - We did some more air experiments about air pressure. We know that planes fly because they get lift. When a plane is propelled forward (thrust) by an engine or propellor, the air goes around the wing. The air molecules that go over the wing move faster, causing the air pressure to be lower above the wing so the higher pressure below the wing pushes the wing up. - We are researching how birds can fly. - We learned about the role of men and women in Ancient Athens and will use this in our "Day in the Life". - We started geometry week where we are learning about lines and angles. We are making a creative presentation to share our learning. - We have been using an on-line thesaurus to help find words to describe an image. We will use these words to write poems. - We wrote another newspaper article, and will be editing and improving them over the next few weeks. Upcoming.... We will be presenting our Air Movement pieces at the assembly on Tuesday at 2:30. Please join us!
- SpacePort field trip forms are due Wed. - Wednesday is "Red, White and/or Pink" Day! - We Care Club is selling cards for $1 on Mon. and Tues. at lunch. They will be delivered within the school on Wed. Feb. 14. Money collected will go to the Mustard Seed. - We Care is also collecting non-perishable food donations for the Food Bank, by Thursday. - Thursday and Friday are Teachers' Convention and the following Monday is Family Day. Ask me about...- We played Rescue Mission in math. We learned about probability with spinners. We also learned how to write ordered pairs. (3,0) - We went swimming and today we got to swim in the waves. Some of had to swim in our clothes. We learned to take our clothes off in the water while treading and to fill them up with air as a floatation devices. This would help us to know what to do if we ever fell in the water with our clothes on. Some groups had to try to pick up 10 pound bricks off the bottom of the pool, either the dive tank or the deep part of the other pool. - Decidedly Jazz Danceworks will be here until next Friday. We have a quote or poem that we responded to in our visual journals and today we will start to put our ideas to movement. Our performance is on Friday morning. Parents are welcome. - We are embodying the properties of air with Ms. El. Watch for information about our upcoming performance. - We experienced a Council of 500 in social studies to help us understand more about how the democracy of Ancient Athens was run. - We found out that Lida Mae was actually a robot in the novel, In Over Their Heads. - We started researching about an animal that flies, to learn the adaptations of how they are able to glide, soar, and/or flap. - We learned that there are the Four Forces of Flight - Thrust, Drag, Lift and Weight. - We wrote a quiz on the properties of air to help us understand what we already know and what we still need to know. - We learned about low pressure and high air pressure and how it can cause objects (a piece of paper supported by two books) to move in ways that we didn't expect. Upcoming....- We are divided into grade 5 and grade 6 groupings for our Decidedly Jazz Danceworks Residency next week.
-Opposite the grade 5 and 6 dance activities, students will be working on developing their understanding of geometry vocabulary. through creating a visual representation. - We will continue to think about the democracy in Ancient Athens, and the roles of men and women. - In science, we will continue to learn about how animals fly, the four forces of flight and Bernoulli's Principle which helps to understand how people have achieved flight. - You are welcome to come to our school DJD presentation on Friday at 11:00. |
Laurel Austman's Grade 5/6 Classroom Website
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