October 15th, 2021

Hello families,

I hope you had a wonderful long weekend and had the chance to spend time with your loves ones.

This week we jumped into representing numbers, specifically expanded form. We created a sketchbook page outlining the many different ways we can represent numbers. I have some of these sheets laminated for repeated use. Please let me know if you would like one for your child to practice at home.

After creating our sketchbook page earlier this week students completed a pre-assessment on Friday, demonstrating their understanding on a "mild, medium, or spicy" number of their choice. Once we have explored each type of representation on more detail, students will complete a post assessment to see how their understanding has changed.

Everyday first day and last day of the week we practice Weekend Writing and Free Write Fridays. These are both low-risk writing opportunities where students can focus on writing down their ideas on a topic of their preferred choice. On Fridays students get to choose the genre of their writing, whether it be a news article, song, poem, list, story, or something else!

For our second writing workshop we watched The Color Monster by Anna Llenas. Using a very similar levelled graphic organizer, each student chose and emotion they wanted to write about and filled out their graphic organizing, including what they feel/look like during that emotion, what causes it, and a memory of when they felt that emotion. We also completed the "share" stage where students share their work with a partner and receive some feedback on their ideas.We will be moving into the draft stage next week!

In literacy groups we have finished up to letter P with our Animated Literacy Program. It is great to see students are using the program to help them sound out their letters to try and spell words they do not know.

During Daily LA stations, the working with teacher station has been exploring making words with the Montessori Moveable Alphabet . This not only helps us with our phonetic awareness but also our overall word knowledge in reading and writing!

This week we delved into ethnobotany: the study of how people of a particular culture and region make use of indigenous (native) plants.

Native to Alberta, we began our study of the Wild Rose. This began with sketching important features and ensuring that we add as much detail as possible. I brought in some rose clippings for students to view and touch as they labelled their diagrams.

You can check out the plant index website here: https://galileo.org/kainai/wild-rose/

On Friday we explored the colours of nature and rubbed three different natural things to create colour on our pages. We then made connections to ethnobotany and how plants can also be used for dyes in clothing, paint, and many other things! (the chives were the least popular item!)

Crazy hair day was so much fun! I loved seeing everyone's creative ideas. We made some crazy hair self-portraits to celebrate this spirit day. Some on the skills we practiced were: