This week has been filled with birthdays it seems. Olivia this past weekend and Howard and Daryl this week. Happy Birthday to all of you! It sure is nice to spend the week celebrating such happy occasions.
After several short weeks in a row, we finally got to spend an entire week together. We started the week by diving deeper into developing our inferencing skills. It is great that we are focusing on because being strong at inferencing can help us in all our studies. For example, inferencing involves being a bit of a detective,
looking for clues in the text to help us understand what we are reading. Being a detective and using clues is also an important skill as a scientist. When we are studying science, we often have questions that we are trying to answer. Often times, we must come up with a hypothesis (educated guess) before we begin testing and researching to find the answers. We have to make inferences using our background knowledge and through more reading in order to move forward in our exploration of topics. Being a reading detective is a skill we need and use all the time.
Congratulations everyone! All of the oral presentations have been done! We’re still looking forward to hearing one more, but Kendrick has been away lately so he hasn’t been able to share about himself yet. All of you did very well! It is pretty intimidating to speak in front of such a large group of your peers, but you all handled it beautifully! It was lovely to hear all of you encouraging your classmates by providing positive and constructive feedback after each presentation. Way to go!
We rounded out our work with the scientific method by talking about some important vocabulary that we need to understand in order to be successful in our experimenting. We used our gummy worm experiment as a model and figured out what these terms meant:
Dependent variable, Independent Variable, Constant Variable, Qualitative data, and Quantitative Data
These are parts of all experiments and are key vocabulary terms to understand if you want your experiment to be valid. Our next topic of investigation in science will be comparing human, plant, and animal life systems. We have begun to collect information/notes and are comparing them one system at a time.
Our Unique School research has begun! We used The David Suzuki Public School as our model to collect information and take notes. 
Using the text from Off to Class by Susan Hughes we read to find out the 5 w’s behind the school (Who, What, Where, When, Why, and How). Our inferencing practice is also coming in handy as we read, because many of those answers aren’t explicitly written on the page… there’s some digging involved. 
Now we’re all in groups of 2 or 3 and have a unique school that we are learning about and collecting information on. By next week, we are aiming to have all our research completed so that we can compare our notes with our team members and write a description about the school researched.
In Math we are continuing to have daily practice of subtraction with borrowing and multiplication drills. Once those are complete, we practice different multiplication and division strategies. This week we worked on skip counting, doubling and halving, and some “tricks” for questions involving numbers like 6 and 9. The strategies are important to learn and practice but, once you have the hang of them, you can choose your favourite and use that strategy to help you solve problems all the time. 
We continued to reinforce our multiplication skills with a few games on Thursday. We completed our first round of our Multiplication War tournament. Next week we’ll continue with round 2. We also played “Connect 4” using a deck of cards and a multiplication chart.
Our Graph of the Week this week focused on Halloween. We created pictographs and a bar graph to represent the data. Then, in keeping with the Halloween theme, we worked on a coordinate graphing hidden picture activity. 
It was quite challenging as it required plotting points and connecting the dots. Two of you were able to successfully complete the picture while the rest of you are still working on it. Try to finish this at home this weekend or at least by Tuesday… Halloween day! What was the hidden picture of?
Tuesday, next week, will be Halloween. It is a fun and exciting day. If you are
going to dress up, make sure it is an appropriate costume for school. To celebrate we are going to spend the last hour of the day playing games together. Please feel free to bring in your favourite board game from home to share with your classmates. Also, you can bring yourself an extra afternoon snack for our game hour if you like.
Finally, Division 6 we wanted to say a HUGE thank you for your dedication and faithfulness in your role as Peer Mediators these past 6 weeks! Every one of you had a chance to do this job and you took your role very seriously. We really appreciate your help out there at lunch with the primary students. It’s time to hand over the job to the next class ( Division 1) and we’ll get another chance to do this job in June… to finish off the year.
Your Blog Response is this: 
- What is ONE thing you ENJOYED about being a Peer Mediator?
- What is ONE thing you found CHALLENGING about peer mediation?
- Will you volunteer to do this again in June?
Have a wonderful weekend Division 6!
Mrs. Gil and Mrs. Davis