Another short week has come and gone as we continue to watch as the season changes around us. The leaves are falling and the beautiful fall colours right outside our window are keeping things bright and beautiful even though we have begun to see more rainy weather. In your planner this week, we reminded you to make sure you come to school prepared to play outside and recess and lunch. This is because it is very rare for it to be an inside day so you must have rainy weather attire so you do not have to spend the afternoons wet and soggy. It is really hard to learn when you are wet and cold, don’t you agree?
Also, the weather changes from day to day here in Burnaby so it is important to take a few moments to watch the evening or morning news to plan your wardrobe for the school day ahead.
In Language Arts this week, we read a passage about video games. The focus of our reading this week was to identify both the main idea as well as the supporting details of the paragraph. These concepts may seem straight forward but they are not. It takes time and practice to be able to read passages and pin point what are sentences are supporting the main idea and which are just fillers. There are six main types of supporting details: descriptions, vocabulary, proof, voices, explanation, and importance. The main idea sentence is usually the subject of discussion and the topic sentence. Most of you were able to identify the main idea quite quickly while more of you found identifying the supporting details more challenging. We will continue to explore this idea and many more reading strategies in the months to come.
Congratulations Division 6 on finishing your “About Me” puzzle piece . They are all up on our bulletin board and it’s a pretty interesting looking puzzle! Now it’s time to prepare to share those with the class in your first ORAL PRESENTATION! 
A photo has been taken of your puzzle piece and is in TEAMS. Use that photo to prepare a short presentation about yourself and what you put on your puzzle piece. Practice with your family as your audience and be ready to share sometime over the next two or three weeks. Last year’s Div.8 students will be the first ones to present and then everyone else will have their turn… random draws will determine who’s up… so… make sure when it’s your turn, you are ready!
We were busy in science this week as we finished our observations of our gummy worm experiments and have begun to write our conclusions. 
We discussed that a well written conclusion of a science experiment must have : the answer to the question you were trying to answer, evidence for your findings with specific data/numbers, and reasoning which explains WHY things happened as they did. Next week, we will take some more time in our pods to finish these up together. If that is not enough, we also had a visit from Naomi from Douglas College’s Institute of Urban Ecology to share her knowledge with us about amphibians living in our communities. More importantly, she had us think about the threats they face living in urban areas and what we can do to help keep them safe.
We embarked on our study of unique schools around the world this week in Social Studies. We started with an “anticipation guide” which included several statements about different schools. In groups we discussed whether or not each statement was true or if we thought it was false. We followed that up with 2 short videos that revealed the answers to our anticipation guide. It was pretty surprising to find out which statements were true… in fact, we were pretty blown away to discover that ALL of the statements were indeed TRUE!! Which fact did you find most unbelievable? We also read about a unique school right here in Canada. 
The David Suzuki Public school in Windsor Ontario is known for how eco-friendly it is and is the “greenest” school in the country! Do you remember any of the unique features that this school has that makes it “green”?
In PE this week we began working on our volleyball skills. Grade 6’s are able to join the school’s volleyball team so we are excited to help you all gain some skills that will encourage you to join the team and have some fun playing this great sport! This week we worked on “bumping”. 
We worked in pairs to get comfortable being in “ready” position and using the proper hand position to bump the ball to our partners. It would be great to see some of you taking volleyballs outside at recess and lunch to practice some more, what do you think?
What do the terms “strike”, “spare”, “gutter”, and “bumper” have to do with? BOWLING!! What a great time we had as a class at REV’s on Friday! Although we were ready to not have bumpers on our lanes, a sudden switch resulted in almost all of us having bumpers! 
That certainly helped our scores and it was so fun to see a bunch of STRIKES and SPARES in the mix as well! Thank you to all the parent volunteers who walked with us to and from the bowling alley and for Mr. Peters for organizing this fun day for us!
Here is your blog response for this weekend about the unique schools we saw on the videos:
- The school I was most shocked by was the ______________ school because ________________________________.
- The school I was most interested to learn more about is the ____________ school because _____________________.
- If I could visit one of the schools I would choose the ___________ school because ______________________________.
Have a fantastic weekend Division 6!
Mrs. Gil and Mrs. Davis