It was a busy yet fun week at Connect Charter! Thank you to the Mini Me to We Elective for organizing Crazy Hair Day, Sports Day, PJ Day and Tie Day. It was a lot of fun to see everyone participating in the school wide event.
In addition to our Annual Spirit week at Connect, grade four students continued to reflect on their Camp Sweet experience through top ten lists, describing a meaningful event and drawing pictures with descriptions. These reflections will be displayed on the walls outside of the classrooms, along with some photos from the trip. Students also finalized their Identity Artifact Keynote slides and submitted this assignment to Edmodo. After our break, students will begin exploring Alberta's identity and what contributes to our province being so unique!
During Parent- teacher Conferences on Thursday and Friday, many parents asked about reading comprehension strategies. Posted below is a brief outline of the Seven strategies that fourth graders will be integrating into their reading time this year.
In addition to our Annual Spirit week at Connect, grade four students continued to reflect on their Camp Sweet experience through top ten lists, describing a meaningful event and drawing pictures with descriptions. These reflections will be displayed on the walls outside of the classrooms, along with some photos from the trip. Students also finalized their Identity Artifact Keynote slides and submitted this assignment to Edmodo. After our break, students will begin exploring Alberta's identity and what contributes to our province being so unique!
During Parent- teacher Conferences on Thursday and Friday, many parents asked about reading comprehension strategies. Posted below is a brief outline of the Seven strategies that fourth graders will be integrating into their reading time this year.
7_comprehension_strategies.pdf |
4.3/ 4.4 Math and Science
The 4.3 and 4.4 classes were excited to be utilizing their IPads as research tools in Science. They learned how to download a document from Edmodo, get it loaded into Pages on their IPad, access the websites provided and search within a website. They all were asked to take a look at the Science Word Wall and find topic they would want to find out more about. They created a mind web indicating what they already know about the subject and what area within the web that stood out as an area of interest. The students then thought about how their area of interest relates back to our theme of Urban Gardening. Once that was accomplished they were free to explore the various websites and gather information. Our Scientist became researchers this week! As researchers they began developing good questioning skills. "How can I challenge my thinking?" One area of interest was the water cycle. We discovered that researching the water cycle alone wasn't a challenge since we could easily access a diagram and study it. Once we connected the water cycle to Urban Gardening as a class we thought of a question that required us to gather data. In the end the big question became: "Does the water cycle provide enough moisture to sustain the community garden?" We found we needed information about the type of plants being used, the area of the garden, how much rain fall Calgary has, in what season do we have the appropriate amount of rainfall.....etc etc. The big question inspired many smaller questions that we wanted to explore. As researchers we continually ask ourselves many questions and challenge our thinking as we move through the process of exploring and discovery. In the week following fall break all the grade 4's will be taking a close look at seeds and germinating our Tomato Seeds (That Mr. Bennett brought to us).... some from the International Space station and some from Earth. We will be tracking their progress and reporting back to the Canadian Space Agency what our findings are.
In math, we continued to solidify our knowledge of Place Value. The students were asked to show a number 3 ways. The 3 ways were pictorially, symbolically and using Base Ten Blocks. For instance if the number was 463 they drew a representation of the number with a chart, used expanded notation and then used the manipulatives provided. Moving forward the students were given a challenge with the Base Ten Riddles. These were quite difficult but the students persisted to find the solutions. An example is: I am 4 hundreds, 12 tens and 14 ones. What am I? They learned that they couldn't add these numbers together until they understood what each number represented.
4 hundreds is 400
12 tens is 120
14 ones is one more 10 and 4 ones
I am 534
The skills and knowledge of an urban gardener are continuing to be developed in the field and in the laboratory this week. " Is a seed alive?" - was a question asked in the lab. The students were exploring how seeds react to changing conditions and how they begin to respond during germination.
We enjoyed meeting with so many of you during the Parent Teacher Interviews! We were thrilled to hear that so many of the children have reported that they are happy at Connect and love school! Yay! We were also happy to hear that most parents are reading the and enjoying the blog!
Have a terrific Thanksgiving holiday!