Hello. We had our Remembrance Day assembly today. Over the week, we talked about what Remembrance Day is and why and how we honour it. Students designed poppies and we made a wreath with them to present at the assembly. The students were very respectful and the assembly was a great success.

 This week we had a math quiz. The point of the quiz was to give me an idea of their understanding of the algorithms for addition as well as their number sense. Please ask your child how they did, or send me an email if they don't remember :). Today we ended the week working on estimating, a real-life skill and a very important element in math. We worked on how to decide what units we should use in our estimating, how to use information we already know to help us, and how to actually go about estimating a variety of things. We will be doing these estimation tasks at least once a week, along with our daily number talks. These will compliment our daily math classes. In science we planted our seeds. Many students have already seen growth. We will be tracking these changes to our eco-columns, as well as hoping for some of our darkling beetles (mealworms) to enter the pupal stage of their development. I've yet to hear back from NASA, but the Canadian Space Agency did email me, and we hope to receive some materials from them soon. In language arts, students are reading their novels regularly. I've switched a few students around to better accommodate their reading levels and interests. We continue to use Reading Powers as our guide for building our comprehension.

In social studies/science/writing, the students began to use their toucan page as a template for creating new pages. This week we gave them information on the Andean condor. Students had to disseminate the information, deciding what was important for their field guide. They then had to decide which section their information belonged in, description, life-cycle, or adaptations. Finally, they had to take the general points they had gathered and turn them into clear, creative, and interesting sentences that would hook readers as well as inform them.

We also constructed a kind of topographical map of Peru using clay. We chose different colours for Peru's different regions, and tried to show geographical differences, such as for the Andes.

Finally, I am still missing a few permission slips for the TELUS Spark field trip. Please send them in ASAP. Thanks!