Bonjour!
This short school week was a sunny one! With only a few days together and a need to catch up on past projects, we did not start many new ones this week, but took some time to review our work and to connect with classmates through games.
Next week, Brantford will have the Scholastic Book Fair in the library! Students will be invited to shop at the book fair on Tuesday afternoon during our library block. Please note:
- Students can only purchase during the class library time, unless away (or if they forget their money). There is a block of time on Wednesday afternoon for those students to come in to purchase. Otherwise, they can buy books online.
- As parents are not able to enter the school, you may shop and order online using the code sent home via email and on the flyer notice, or at this link: https://virtualbookfairs.scholastic.ca/pages/5171073
Next week is also a dress-up spirit week organized by Division 4. The themes will be: Monday Monday (dress in your regular clothes), Twin Tuesday (dress the same as a friend), Wild Wednesday (dress in animal print or wear animal ears), Throwback Thursday (wear clothes from the 1970s or 80s) and Floral Friday (dress to welcome spring weather)! This is a totally optional event, so if your child would like to dress up for fun, they are most welcome, but not required.
On Wednesday, we completed a reading assessment for comprehension. Throughout the week, those who had not completed their family day poems were given time to complete their writing and illustrations.
Wednesday was also Pink Shirt Day! We learned about the origin of Pink Shirt Day, as a response by students to a new student experiencing homophobic bullying for wearing a pink shirt. After witnessing a new Grade 9 student be bullied for his pink shirt, two Grade 12 students decided to take a stand and organize the rest of the student body to wear pink shirts in solidarity. We talked about the definition of bullying (that it is intentional, ongoing and targeted harm) and the difference between being a bystander and an ally. We read a story about friendship and reflected on the qualities of a friend and how we could be allies instead of bystanders.
In Math, we practiced fact families for multiplication and division. Students were asked to write multiplication and division sentences using certain products and their factors (or quotients and their divisors and dividends) . We used the multiplication table as a tool to help multiply or break apart the numbers, and practiced math vocabulary in how we talked about our work. “Fact families” are all the ways we can frame a collection of numbers to explain their relationships. For example:
3 x 4 = 12
4 x 3 = 12
12 / 3 = 4
12 / 4 = 3
In 
Science, we practiced a note-taking stlrategy that the class was introduced to last year in Grade 2. The method is “CHOMP”: cross out, highlight, make notes, and paraphrase. We used this strategy while reading an informative text about mountains and how they are formed. Students then worked independently or in pairs to make their notes, which we will add to mountain paintings completed earlier in the week. We learned that there are five different types of mountains: volcanic, fold, fault-block, dome and erosion.
On Thursday afternoon, we took a moment for connection with classmates by playing board games together. Sometimes simple activities are important for building communication skills, problem solving and simply having fun with classmates we might not play with every day!
The games look so fun!!!!
We have plenty of board games to play! I hope the kids had fun.