Early October and Thanksgiving Art

Our focus for the first week of October included review of the big ideas of Growth Mindset. Photos of our bulletin board on Growth Mindset are included below which include examples of what we imagine our brains look like when we seek challenges; the more lines (connections) we have in our brains (due to challenges) the more we're growing our brains!

We also explored shapes using tangrams and continued our work with measurement. Our class began our study about the First Peoples of Canada. We read, discussed, and summarized the main points of the scientific theories regarding Beringia and will continue debating and sharing our understanding this coming week.

Our class also enjoyed making autumn themed cards with our Grade 1 buddies. We finished the cards on Friday by writing Thanksgiving messages inside. Happy Thanksgiving!

Is it the End of September Already?

Yes, it went by quickly! Our first month of the school year has come to a close. Here are a few highlights from our last week of September:
We explored shapes and space using pattern blocks. Our goal was to build a shape using specific criteria (such as number or types of blocks) and the pattern blocks available to us. This exploration helped us to begin understanding the term "area" before tackling problems that involve finding the area of a space.
We completed surveys about our intelligences, graphed and discussed our results, and decided on our strongest strengths. Some of us are reflecting on our strengths or we were absent, so we will add our names to our intelligence chart (shown below) this coming week. We will use this chart to find peer helpers during the school year as each person signed up under one of his/her strongest strengths.
We published our Class Treaty after writing the drafts together. Our treaty will guide our choices and actions throughout the school year. Those of us in attendance signed the treaty as a sign of our commitment and the rest of us will sign next week.
We also worked on Read to Someone after successful practice of Read to Self. Our class is doing a great job of focusing on our reading and we're beginning to share strategies and book recommendations with each other.
In September, our class focused on building community, understanding multiple intelligences (different ways people can be smart) and growth mindset, and increasing our focus. We will review these concepts during the school year and use them as a foundation for our learning. Let's get to more learning in October!

Measurement and Growth Mindset

We finished another week of learning and have a few highlights to share. Our focus in math problem solving has been exploring different units of measurement, such as metres and centimetres. Students have been working through routine math problems individually and in pairs and have engaged with open ended problems in small groups. We are also learning what a "good problem solver" does.

We have concluded our introduction to Growth Mindset using the Class Dojo video series. Miss Cichosz will review these ideas with us through mini lessons during the year. To illustrate how the neurons of our brains make connections, we crumpled scrap paper and outlined the creases with marker. Later, we wrote fixed mindset statements, such as, "I can't do math," and changed them to growth mindset statements, such as, "I can learn to do math as long as I keep trying." We learned that our neurons make more connections and we become smarter when we challenge ourselves! We're looking forward to a new week of seeking challenges!

Our First Full Week at School

We did a lot of learning during our first full week back at school! Some highlights include organizing our class library, so that we all know what kind of books we have in our classroom, and talking about why we read and attitudes and actions of good readers. We focused on measurement and shapes in math, explored reliable and unreliable units of measurement, and worked in groups to explore regular and irregular shapes. We're excited to learn even more next week!

First Day of Classes

Team 15 had a wonderful first day together on Friday! We played games to get to know each other, had fun outdoors, and attended our first school assembly as a class where we reviewed the importance of safety, respect, and working together as a school family.

We also learned about growth mindset, specifically about how we can train our brains to be smarter like we can train our muscles to be stronger. Students took a short assignment home to complete over the weekend which was posted on our class Remind. The class is pictured below solving and writing math riddles about themselves, such as, "My age is 5 + 5 + 5 - 5 -1." We hope everyone had a great weekend and is ready to start the first full week back at school!

     

Welcome back!

I hope everyone had a great summer! If the former Grade 5s are reading this post, I wish you a wonderful start in middle school and Grade 6!

I'm excited to start my second year at Linwood School with both familiar and new faces and am returning well rested, with wonderful memories from a camping trip in Iceland, and engaged to be married to Chris, my fiancé. I'm looking forward to meeting our new students and welcoming our returning ones to Team 15. See you this week for conferences and our first day (Friday) back in class!

A panorama of a waterfall in Iceland

FortWhyte Alive Field Trip Memories - June 15, 2016

Team 15 did a lot of learning at FortWhyte in June. The class (along with the other Grade 4/5s) learned about the people of the prairies and visited a sod house and tipis. Students also learned about plant and animal adaptations on a guided nature walk and activities such as critter dipping and finding which tool (beak) would be the best for eating particular insects. We had a great time and an interesting review of our learning from the year in Science and Social Studies!