Purple and Grey Day, tomorrow!

First, a reminder that tomorrow is Purple and Grey day!  Our Opening Liturgy of the new school year is at 9:30 a.m., and as always, we wear Purple and Grey when we gather as a school community.

A big Thank You to all of the parents who were able to take time out of their busy schedules to pop by our Curriculum Evening Wednesday night!  I know it is a very busy time of year, and there is a lot going on, however it is always nice to meet the parents of the students I spend my day with. If you were unable to make it last night, (and believe me, I completely understand!) there is a link to the presentation in my last blog post below.

The permission forms and an information sheet regarding our annual Terry Fox Run fundraiser for the Canadian Cancer Society went home with the students Wednesday.  Please return the signed permission slip, and consider a donation to the cancer society in support of our run.  As well, we are always looking for volunteers to assist in supervision, particularly at crosswalks and along the route.  If you are available to help out that morning, we would love to hear from you!

Here’s what we’ve been doing so far:

In Math, we have completed the Youcubed Week of Inspirational Math lessons from Jo Boaler from Stanford University.  These lessons are designed to grow their math brains, and impress upon the students the importance of struggling to solve difficult math problems, and to believe in their math ability.  We have tweeted out many pictures of the students working through these problems, and Jo Boaler not only “liked” and retweeted many of our tweets, she also included us in the Stanford University Newsletter!  You can see it here.  The students were very excited to be recognized by such an elite global math community!  We have now moved on to place value in both Grade 4 and Grade 5.  We want to make sure students have a solid grasp of numbers and their value before moving on to operations.

In Language Arts, we have modelled a read-aloud in each grade.  Grade 4 have listened to Self-Monitoring strategies modelled while enjoying the book Catching the Moon: The Story of a Young Girl’s Baseball Dream by Crystal Hubbard.  The students have anchor charts listing “fix up”strategies in their Hapara Language Arts folders.  Grade 5 are listening to Rapunzel told from a different point of view, and are Making Connections to it as we read.  They have a chart comparing what they know of Rapunzel and her prince from previous stories to what they are learning from this different story, in their Hapara Language Arts folders in their Drive.  They are also listing some character traits of one of the main characters.  You can see what your child has written at any time by logging into their drive and looking at their notebooks.