I hope everyone is keeping well! We have been very busy at school trying to stay on top of our units, despite missing days here and there.
In math, we are finishing up our measurement unit this week. We can't spend too long on any one concept so if a student misses a day, it is important that they ask for the work so that they can review it at home. In this unit, we have worked on measuring elapsed time (using a 24 hour clock), changes in temperature, perimeter, area, mass and we will spend the rest of this week on volume and capacity. The math homework this week is a review of what we have covered so far. Next Monday we will have our pretest, followed by a couple days of review, then our test on Thursday. Keep your eyes open for the pretest which will likely come home on Tuesday.
Thanks to Mrs. Mitchell for collecting and pre-measuring all the boxes we used to practice calculating total surface area of a prism!
We've started a new art project! For this one, we are not trying to recreate work in the style of a specific artist or group. We are focusing on line, form, colour and shadow in graphite and pastel drawings. We are using musical instruments as our subject, just because they are so nice and curvy. Our drawings are not meant to be realistic, and we will use colour sparingly to accentuate one special area. We started some sketches last week.
In French, I am working on correcting our fictional narrative stories so that we may begin writing/typing our good copies. At the same time, students are working on their new Club de Lecture books - they have a chapter or two a week, depending on length. In addition, we have our independent research project, assigned last week. Please see the outline in Google Classroom to read more about this. Since we have no strike days this week, I will try to give a little in-class time as well, as the idea was to have something to do during those days off.
Thanks to our fantastic gym teacher for all her work setting up and running my favourite unit of the year - gymnastics. It always looks like such fun! We have two more periods this week, on Tuesday and Thursday. Please remind your student to come appropriately dressed.
It has come to our attention that some of our older students are not always using their personal technology appropriately. We would like to ask all parents (especially of grade 6 students) to please have a chat with your child about how they are using their phone or device both in and out of school. Of course, at school it should only be out of a backpack for a specific academic purpose, and with the permission of the teacher. Too often, we find students pulling phones out during transition times, without permission. This slows us all down. We all have access to the office phone for communicating with parents during the school day. We have also learned that some students have been posting inappropriate pictures, videos or comments on social media. We need to make sure this stops immediately. While I have a lot of trust that our students would not participate in this type of behaviour, it is always a good reminder to be having regular conversations about this. The Principal made an announcement this morning, and we will review this in class as well. Thank you for your follow-up.
Have a great week!