Dear parents,
My apologies for not sending home our rubrics and tests sooner - I am working as fast as I can! These will come home tomorrow for signature. Again, please read over the additional learning skills expectations for Term 1.
Students have also received a registration form for our annual vision/hearing clinic. This will be held on Thursday, December 12th. If you would like to have your student's vision or hearing checked, please return the form with payment by Wednesday the 11th at the latest.
On Monday, our grade 5s were assigned a date for their Science presentation and this date should be noted in their agenda. They had a period of in-class time to begin preparing, but as we need to wrap up this unit in just a few classes, they understand that final preparations need to be done for homework and that this may involve getting together with their partner, the same way the grade 6s did.
As we have been working on outlining the main idea (in English) and writing a summary (in French) for some time, in our English time right now, students are working on an assignment that combines these skills with learning about a global issue closely tied to our grade 6 science topic of biodiversity. I'm sure many of you have heard about the "Great Pacific Garbage Patch" or have read similar articles about plastic pollution. We watched a couple videos today outlining this issue, and we are working on reading an article about it. Once read, we will work on our main idea and summary skills, as well as share our opinions about this issue. Finally, as a media assignment, we will work in pairs to create informative posters on this topic. Many kids are already aware of this problem and/or were shocked at some of the information in the videos we watched. I encourage them to delve deeper into this issue if it interests them. Here are the links we are already using, but there are many more informative videos on Youtube, and plenty of articles to be found.
National Geographic Article that we are reading
Science Insider Video
The Swim Video
In French, all students have now been assigned to a Club de Lecture, differentiated by colour. Each Club has a short story to read and questions to answer on it. The questions range from vocabulary development, to grammar, to comprehension, and of course, we are writing a résumé! I have explained that completing their Club de Lecture reading and questions is independent work. Students may of course use any free class time to pull this out and work away at it, and depending how other work is going, may be able to get it done at school. If, however, our group meeting date is approaching and they still have questions to answer, it must be completed as homework. Some students have already elected to bring it home to begin working on. I haven't set our first meeting dates yet, but I've asked students to work on the first two sections of questions (parts A & B) for next week. At our group meeting, we will talk about the text and take up the questions together. Guided reading groups like this give me a much needed opportunity to listen to students read individually and support students with specific skills or concepts. In these first groups, we are focusing on the passé composé tense, which we worked on last month, as well as reviewing the elements of narrative writing, which we learned about in writing our personal stories. Please ask your reader which group they are in and what short story they are reading!
This Friday is a PA Day for students. Have a great weekend!