Even with a unexpected short week last week, January is still jumping along at a 
feverish pace. We were super busy this week, making up for our lost days due to snow. It is a pleasure to say that you are always ready and raring to go so we have been learning a lot and getting through so much in our time together!
We started the week by sharing our Genre Advertisements. Some of you pre-recorded them while others performed them live. It was impressive to see the creativity many of you showed in your ads. Many of you were able to incorporate themes from your genre into your ads to get the audiences attention and make us all laugh or pay close attention. 
Well done! Unfortunately, some of you did not put in the planning, effort, or practice needed to present your ads to the best of your ability.
Hopefully, seeing the ads of your classmates who did take that time will inspire you to try harder next time.
We put a pause on our Force and Motion unit this week to investigate a little about Matter so we would be prepared for our in-class workshop on Wednesday. We talked about the properties and states of matter. Also, we learned about physical and chemical changes. 
We investigated how matter can change states and learned a lot of vocabulary we can use to describe properties and describe how states change. Most important, we learned that temperature, heating and cooling, are the main factors involved in changing matter from one state to another.
Wednesday, we had a visitor from SCWIST (Society for Canadian Women in Science and Tech) name Shirley. 
Shirley volunteers her time to visit schools to teach and provide hands on learning experiences for
classes just like ours. We were so very lucky to have her come and teach us all about the world of Ooblek. 
Ooblek has properties of both liquids and solids. You can slowly dip your hand into it like a liquid, but if you squeeze the oobleck or punch it, it will feel solid. You all had lots of fun making your own and exploring how it felt. Shirley was impressed with how much you already knew about matter and its phases and we were very proud of how engaged you all were in both the discussions and the hands on activity.
We continued our study of Viola Desmond and the impact she has had on Canadian history. Our mini books are well under way as you illustrate each page to match the text. You all have a collection of clipart to help with the illustrations, but, remember to ADD your own illustrations to make the text come alive even more. Next week, classes will be going on a gallery walk to view doors or bulletin boards celebrating Black Excellence. Our door will tell Viola’s story– through the use of 10 information cards that you worked on in small groups. It’s going to be fun to see what other classes have done and who they have chosen to highlight!
As part of our career study, we have begun a program called “Our Business World”. This is an extension of what we are doing around money with Mrs. Gil and will help prepare us for a pretty exciting project in the future!
We also started an exploration of the people of our world using the book, “If the World Were 100 People”. Every week we are looking at questions posed in the book about the population of the planet. Since there are approximately 8 BILLION people living on earth, the book has reduced the population to 100 people. We predict our guesses using a pictograph ( of 100 people) and then we hear the actual statistic. Since we’re using 100 as our total, we can graph the information using a pie ( circle) graph. This is helping us get familiar with percentages and how to divide the circle accurately.
On the horizon, we will be starting our Hip Hop unit in PE over the next few weeks. We will be working with a Hip Hop instructor to learn a routine that we will be performing for the school audience as well as for parents. 
Our class will receive 6 lessons to perfect our moves. For some of you this will be very familiar but for some of you, this may be your first time experiencing this. We hope all of you will give the instructors you best focus and attention so we can all have fun and make this the best performance it can be!
Here is your blog response for this weekend:
In anticipation of HIP HOP , list 3 songs that you think would be fun to do a dance to:
Have a great weekend Division 6! See you on next week!
Mrs. Gil & Mrs. Davis
Welcome back everyone! It is so nice to see you all again. It was a wonderful break for all of you from the sound of it and we, your teachers, are well rested and ready to work as well. It is sure to be an exciting beginning to 2024 and a wonderful rest of the school year. There is much to look forward to and lots of growth to experience.
Next week, you will be creating an advertisement that will be performed live in the classroom or videotaped/recorded at home. These advertisements will be no more than 30 seconds long and they will try to “sell” your genre to your classmates. Let’s see how many of you can convince someone in the class to give your genre a try.
Many of you have piggy banks while only a few of said you have a bank account. During our discussions we talked about the importance of savings accounts and how your money can grow if you invest it somewhere that collects interest for you. 
If you don’t have a bank account maybe you can convince your parents to help you take you piggy bank money and put it into a savings account so you can start earning that interest!
This week we spent some time reviewing the Laws of Motion, which many of you have learned about before and next week, we will prepare ourselves for our upcoming experiments.
Our “Graph of the Week” lessons are embarking on a new type of graph: the pie/circle graph! We learned that pie graphs are created using fractions and the percentages that those fractions represent. How do we calculate percent? Great question! Well, we have to use division to convert the fraction into a decimal number. Then we multiply that by 100… which will give us a percentage. The formula is “N( numerator) divided by D (denominator) X 100”. Our first GOW this week asked us what we would choose to do in the snow and that is the data that we used to create our first circle graph. We’ll be practicing that a LOT more in the weeks and months ahead!
We played some two on two and three on three games and it looked like you had a lot of fun. 
We will continue to work on basketball in gym until the end of the month. Our Hip Hop dance unit will begin the last week of January and after two weeks, we will have a choreographed dance to share!
We did some brainstorming about who she is and then we read some information and watched some videos about her life. Yes, she is the face on our $10 bill… but there’s a lot more to that story! We will continue to explore more about Viola Desmond’s life next week too!
Monday is also a Young People’s Concert Day. We will be leaving the school at 10:15 for a 10:30 show at the Michael J. Fox Theatre. We will be back at school in time for lunch.