What a great first week! Update September 7th, 2018

Hello Everyone!

What a great first week back! Welcome to all of our new students!

In connection with both the core competencies of personal awareness, social responsibility, and communication, we focused our first week on building community and relationships to have a great year together!

We learned about our new classmates through inquiry adventure cards, making marble roller coasters in teams, creating paper rockets and launching them with an air compressor, and completing math challenges! We also had the opportunity to touch upon math and science topics which will be a part of our first unit on STRUCTURE, such as gravity, kinetic and potential energy, and the structure of equations. On Monday, we will introduce the first unit in class and then post information on the blog for you, as well.

While school has a lot of regulations and rules, which we create to ensure everyone’s comfort and safety, each of us has a responsibility and a role to play in creating the community we work and learn in at Suncrest. So, we had discussions about what kinds of strengths we bring to the school, what we want in a great classroom environment, and what are hopes are for the coming year. We also identified a set of VALUES and talked about the difference between rules, beliefs, and values, and why they are important. Through collaborative stations, the class identified a set of values we will live by during the year. Thank you to the many students who volunteered to help make a poster of these for our classroom, so we can refer to our shared values every day. 

Division 5 values:

  • patience
  • differences
  • being comfortable in your space
  • risk-taking
  • community
  • family and friends
  • safety
  • kindness, kind language, and compliments
  • being open-minded
  • effort, enthusiasm, and curiosity
  • privacy, personal space, and awareness of others
  • respect for others
  • caring for animals, ourselves, and the environment
  • sharing ideas
  • helping others
  • responsibility
  • humour
  • honesty
  • humility
  • being a good communicator

Good luck to everyone finishing the 1-24 math problem! Let me know if you want another hint! We played several math-related games, and we also gave everyone a chance to experience free choice, getting to know one another while playing games, enjoying the class gerbils, or sharing a book with someone.

For Next Week:

Please remember to bring your letter, a photo of yourself doing an activity outside of school (printed, black and white, real photo, whatever!), the parent questionnaire, and the social media consent form.

For parents, information regarding parent conferences and signing up for times will be coming later next week.

Have a great weekend, and I look forward to getting to know you more as we continue next week!

Ms. D