From us to you, have an outstanding winter break, enjoy your time with family and recharge for more excitement on January 5th!
Sincerely,
Mrs. Hordyk
Mr. MacKenzie
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We love these kids! After debriefing about the day, we couldn't stop praising each child for their generosity and kindness. As the year progresses and we get to know everyone more and more, we are thankful for the excellent individuals and personalities we get to work with every day.
From us to you, have an outstanding winter break, enjoy your time with family and recharge for more excitement on January 5th! Sincerely, Mrs. Hordyk Mr. MacKenzie As we've been reading Mr. Popper's Penguins, students have been sharing and thinking about their connections. We discussed and shared 3 different types of connections for students, Text-to-Self, Text-to-World, and Text-to-Text. As the year progresses, students will continue practicing this reading comprehension skill while they read to themselves and when we are reading to the class.
We have been slaving over our readers' theatre scripts for tomorrow, and everyone is buzzing about sharing their performances! We will have our celebration of learning throughout the morning. During that time, students will be able to snack on popcorn. If you would like to send a healthy snack for the class, please feel free! Tomorrow is pajama day, caroling day, and we have our performances. Oh ya, and report cards will be going home tomorrow. It is a busy, busy time! Also, we have put the pictures of gingerbread houses up on the gingerbread math web site (Scroll right to the bottom). Sincerely, Mrs. Hordyk Mr. MacKenzie I know we keep talking about readers' theatre, but the work they are doing is fantastic! Today we put two groups together and had 1 group provide feedback to the other. We are trying to embed peer feedback and self-assessment into everything the kids are doing. Sometimes it can be difficult receiving feedback from classmates, but we are encouraging students to use it to improve their work. "Fail Forward" is an important part of our class philosophy. We are working with the children to understand that a perceived "failure" is really just an opportunity for further learning, and that perseverance is extremely important.
Speaking of perseverance, the students solved their 2-day math riddle based on the 12 Days of Christmas song. After watching the video we asked students, how many presents were given total? They found it tricky, because they added up the presents for the 12th day (78), but then often forgot to add it to the total number of presents on day 11, 10, 9, etc. Most students attempted to solve it one of two ways, the math is below. Congratulations to those who were able, it was an extremely challenging problem! After receiving feedback from themselves (watching a recording), a peer group, and a teacher, students will participate in a "Celebration of Learning" on Friday where they perform their final play for the class. Their performances will be filmed for you to see at the student-led conferences. Also, please be advised that this Friday is "Pajama Day", so they will be able to just roll out of bed and come to school! Have a great night, Mrs. Hordyk Mr. MacKenzie Teachers love connecting with individual students as much as possible. We are constantly trying to learn more about how they learn, what their interests are, and how we can help them. Today, students have been started doing something that we will do regularly, throughout the year: They wrote us letters.
In the letters they were encouraged to tell us how they learn, what they've done well lately, and what they are excited about. We will read them all within the next two days and provide students with a response. We were very fortunate to watch the kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 2 classes perform this afternoon. The kids were great and we were reminded how hard work and determination can really pay off! Tomorrow we are going to be continuing work on an extremely challenging math riddle. More details are to come! Have a great night, Mrs. Hordyk Mr. MacKenzie We got down and dirty today as we built our gingerbread houses! One of the first challenges the students had was to try and create a house out of graham crackers. It was fun to watch as they 'failed forward' and learned after each attempt. Once they had their plans solidified, they went to glueing their homes together using icing. It was an experience they will not soon be forgetting! Pictures will be up tomorrow.
Students also scratched up a bunch of minerals using their fingernails, pennies, and nails to determine the minerals' hardness and to compare and sort them. They then used a field guide to try and identify the minerals. Please be aware that tomorrow in the afternoon the students will be watching the Winter Concert from 1:30 onwards. Have a great evening! Mrs. Hordyk Mr. MacKenzie We have a bunch of little actors and actresses in class! Students have been working on a number of different readers' theatre scripts during their guided reading. Today the students collaboratively developed a rubric to help them understand what they need to do to be successful (below). We are doing our rubrics in the shape of a bullseye so that students can visualize throwing a dart into the middle. As of this afternoon at 1:45, students have also placed their orders for the decorations for their gingerbread house. Please send your child to school with some graham crackers so that we can begin construction on Monday. It was really challenging for students to complete the order forms today, because they required multiplication and addition to create a running total. We will continue working on this in the future! In science we are continuing our work on sorting and classifying rocks. There is a useful website where kids can do different online experiments. If you are interested in having your child explain some concepts, follow this link for a short activity. Have an outstanding evening. Until tomorrow, Mrs. Hordyk Mr. MacKenzie Did we ever have fun today! We introduced the multiplication table to students, and we had them fill it out to 5x5 on their own. They understood how important this skill is, because they will be placing their orders for decorations for their gingerbread house tomorrow!
Although there is a little bit of work that is still needed, they overwhelmingly were positive about the experience. If you are working with your child at home, we are teaching them to understand multiplication in the following ways: 1. As equal groups (4x3 is 4 groups with 3 in each group) 2. As an array (3x2 is 3 rows with 2 in each row) 3. As skip counting (5x5 can be found if you skip count by 5, 5 times, such as 5, 10, 15, 20, 25) 4. As repeated addition (3x4 is the same as 3+3+3+3) There have been some questions about how to contribute to the gingerbread house project. If you could send your child to school with graham crackers, we would be very appreciative. Also, if you would like to donate some candy to the project, the flyer showing what we are selling is below. Any other questions, please leave them in the comment section below or feel free to send us an email. Tomorrow students will be ordering their materials. A tutorial for how we are doing this can be found here (Or you can hover your mouse over "Math" > "Gingerbread Math"). Have a great night! Sincerely, Mrs. Hordyk Mr. MacKenzie What a day! We are all exhausted and there was a lot of exceptional learning that took place in our classroom today. We began with a reflection on our "Character" in learning. Students provided us with lots of examples on how they have demonstrated character while at school including persevering through challenging tasks, finding solutions to social and academic problems, and doing what is right, even if it is hard. If you are looking for more information about character, follow this link and scroll to the bottom of the page.
Students demonstrated great character as they provided positive feedback and leadership to the grade 1s. The grade ones have been building "traps" for a lost gingerbread man. They were gracious enough to bring their traps into our classroom so that our students could practice asking questions, providing feedback, and sharing ideas. On another note, we are very sorry that the link didn't work yesterday for our gingerbread project page. It has been updated, but you can also just click here. We are sorry for how quiet the video is - we'll fix it when we get a chance! Tomorrow we will continue working on our readers' theatre scripts. Students are starting to read fluently and with appropriate intonation, which is very exciting to see! Have a great night, Mrs. Hordyk Mr. MacKenzie Today was a day of self-reflection and exploration. Students went through their writing books and critically examined all of their writing from the beginning of the year until now. They then found 3 pieces of writing and tagged them as their best, mid, and low and wrote explanations on post-it notes. Students made comments such as, "I could have used more specific words", and "I didn't use capitals in the right places".
The grade 1s have also noticed the work we have been doing around building rooms and purchasing items, and have asked us to help track down a lost gingerbread man by building homes and luring him in. Over the course of the next two weeks, students will go through a number of mathematical tasks as they purchase items for their gingerbread houses and construct them from the ground up. There is a website to guide them, here. There are also tasks that can be completed at home to prepare them for the lessons, if you are looking for additional work for your children. Tomorrow we will continue examining rocks and planning our gingerbread homes. As each student will be building a gingerbread home, we require bases for each child. If you have sturdy cardboard at home (not cereal boxes) that we could build homes on, please send them to school in the next couple of days. If you have extras, please send those as well because we have around 100 grade 3 students! Also, please pre-cut them to into squares that are roughly 20cm by 20cm. We will be providing the supplies to build the gingerbread, but if you would like to contribute in some way, please let us know! We look forward to adding to the momentum tomorrow! Sincerely, Mrs. Hordyk Mr. MacKenzie The best question we gave kids today, was: How many legs are at your table group? It was fun to watch them multiply the number of legs on the chairs by the number of chairs (4x4), then add that to the number of legs on the table (1x4), and then add that to the number of legs on the students' legs (2x4). Their problem solving was excellent to observe!
After the spelling test today, students received their new words for the upcoming week. We have been impressed lately at how they are challenging themselves, and how they are getting more correct each week. Next week will be exciting! Students are going to be engaging in a number of tasks that will make them think, practice, and perform. A very large undertaking will be our upcoming 2-week readers' theatre project where students will learn lines, practice at home and at school, and will perform for their peers on the last day of before winter break. Please remember that there will be no school tomorrow, but we look forward to seeing the class bright and early Monday morning! Sincerely, Mrs. Hordyk Mr. MacKenzie |
AuthorsMr. MacKenzie and Mrs. Frampton are Grade 4 teachers at Evergreen School.
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June 2016
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