Weekly Update

Hello students and parents!  

The next two weeks are going to be very exciting and busy for everyone.  Starting tomorrow we will begin our robotics unit.  For the next two weeks the students will be concentrating on understanding how the robot works, programming and building.  When they master that part they will have to use the robots to solve a problems posed to them.  I anticipate it will be a lot of work, but also a lot of fun a and a fantastic learning experience.

The students have had an opportunity to do research on the Maritime provinces.  They have been working in groups creating a poster about their province and the goal is to attract tourists to come visit their great province.  They will eventually be making commercials to go along with their posters!

During their research the students discovered the diverse landscape of the Maritimes, so they each chose a landscape of their choice using google maps and used that picture to inspire their pastel art work they created last week.  I’m happy to say the art looks fantastic and the students are now using the art to inspire them to write a story and even poetry!

In science we have been continuing our boat and buoyancy unit, doing a variety of experiments and tying it in with our inquiry with the East coast work.  

The students have been challenging themselves in math.  They have been using their own personal strategies to solve double digit addition problems.  The new math curriculum encourages personal strategies, and using a variety of strategies to solve problems.  As a class we have shared our strategies and attempted to use different ones to different problems.  I have stressed to the students the importance of ‘sharing your thinking’ showing in pictures, words or number combinations on how they arrived at the answer.  We have also started story problems, and the students have even been coming up with problems on their own!  This week we will be focusing on double digit subtraction, it’s always a bit trickier than addition so I anticipate the students will share personal strategies just like when we did the addition problems.  

Hope everyone had a great weekend!

Stephanie