It's a short week!

Welcome back after a beautiful Thanksgiving weekend!  I hope everyone was able to enjoy all the blessings of family, friends, food and the lovely outdoors.
Today during our opening morning prayer, the students and I discussed how important it is to stop and thank God for our many blessings and that it is a great reminder that prayers of thanks are wonderful prayers to share with God.  It was so wonderful hearing so many messages of thanks and how excited the children were to share their weekend experiences with our classroom community.

The students worked hard on a recount entry in their writing notebooks.  We practiced writing opening sentences that grab the reader's attention and lets the reader have an idea of what they are about to read!  We are also working on using teacher feedback to 'bump up' our writing.  It is important to take time to read over written work and look for missing words, punctuation, capitals and ensure we have added enough detail and juicy adjectives.

Some important concepts we are working on while reading are visualizing, making meaningful connections, author's message, author's purpose (P.I.E.) and providing an example from the text to support our opinion (e.g. I think that the Author's Message is.....I know this because in the text.....).

In Math, we continue to work on graphing and making sure we include a scale that begins at 0, a title, labels and categories/choices.  We are also working on mental math strategies, adding and subtracting large numbers (2 and 3 digit numbers) and representing numbers in a variety of ways (e.g., Base Ten Blocks, expanded form, standard form, money, place value chart).

Visual Arts has been a lot of fun this year!  We have learned colouring and shading techniques, line art as well as pointillism.  The students worked very hard combining all of their new art techniques in their "Giving Thanks" projects.  Excellent work 3D!

Science is also underway and we have already learned a lot about soil!  The students are very engaged with this unit and some have even started researching some of their soil wonderings. We are gathering information and some students have even started putting together a Google Slide presentation to share with the rest of the class.  If you have soils at home that would be fun to compare and look at, send some samples in!  We would love to examine a variety of soil and look at the similarities and differences.  Ask your child what the 4 Major Components of soil are.

In Religion we continue to learn how special and unique we all are and that we all bring our special gifts and talents with us.  God loves each one of us and calls us by name.  We are loved by our Father.

Do not be afraid, I am with you
I have called you each by name
Come and follow Me
I will bring you home
I love you and you are mine

This Friday is 'wear your jersey to school day' to raise money for United Way!  Pull out those Sens, Redblacks, Blue Jay Jerserys or any other favourite team shirts you have.  Let's support a great cause!




Your Partner in Education,

Mrs. Caluori