Update for November 23-27

November 27, 2020 

Dear Parents,

This week in language we began writing the rough drafts of our fiction narrative stories. Most of the students are finished, and next week we will begin revising and editing by focussing on strong lead sentences, character development, setting development, and deepening our story by using a “rising action” sequence of events. 

In reading, we took a look at our short answers from the story we read last week called “The Sleepover”, and we bumped up our answers after looking at the exemplars. Students are getting much better at responding to texts by giving some details directly from the text. We need to work on making sure that those details are the best ones we can find to provide proof for our thinking. Next week we will be reading a story about snowshoeing and completing the short answer and multiple choice questions, as well as bumping up our answers later in the week.

In math this week we focussed on composing and decomposing numbers up to a thousand. We learned many different ways to represent the same number. For example using expanded form, written form, displaying numbers as a sum of other numbers (326 = 300+26, or 320 +6), using base ten blocks, and by showing the number on a hundreds chart. We also learned how we can represent numbers in uncommon ways. For example we can show 226 as 1 hundreds,  12 tens and 6 ones.  Getting used to being able to manipulate numbers this way helps students a great deal later when we are regrouping in addition, subtraction and multiplication. Next week we will be focussing on comparing and ordering numbers  by using number lines to assist us. We had a small check in on Friday to see how well students were understanding place value so far and students did a great job overall. Our next unit in math is going to be representing multiplication and division by showing equal groups, arrays, and as repeated addition.

Another area of math that we focussed on this week was coding.  We started by writing simple codes to fill in squares on a grid, and in later lessons we learned how to debug code when we saw mistakes. Students greatly enjoyed these activities, and we will be continuing them throughout the year, as they are part of our new math curriculum.

We took a break from science this week, but will be beginning our next unit in science next week, which is “Soils in the Environment”. We will begin next week by learning about what soil is and the importance of it, and also by learning about some of the different types of soil.

Once again I want to thank you for your kind support, and if you ever wish to talk about your child's progress please feel free to contact me. Please click on the link here for some pictures from this week.

Yours,

Chris Pouliot