Welcome back Division 7!
After a restful Winter Break, it is nice to be back with all of you again. We jumped right back into working straight away. On Monday, we moved our seating arrangement slightly so you all have new desk partners for the month. Also, we chose our jobs for the first week back so you can start earning those Mega Bucks again. 
For many of you, Mega Bucks were earned on the break as you completed your reading logs and hit some milestones. There are only a few students who have yet to take advantage of the reading club earnings, hopefully this new month will be the one where we see EVERYONE in the class on the chart. If you are one of the students not on the chart yet, maybe this could be a goal for you?
Speaking of goals……we began the week with a deep dive into Growth Mind Sets and New Year Resolutions. We took our Brain Booster time this week, to think about ourselves last year.
Many of us made mistakes but also, we had many successes too. We asked you to think back on your last year and tell us about some of your accomplishments. Then we asked you to look forward and think about setting goals to build on your last years achievements. Having a Growth Mind Set instead of a Fixed Mind Set is something we are working towards. Great success can come from accepting that mistakes
happen and are a great way to learn, rather than a place to get stuck.
Ask your parents about their last year. Did they make any mistakes they learned from? Do they have any resolutions? Share yours with them as well.
We followed this up with a collaborative puzzle art activity as well! We began with the phrase “This is our year to be…” and then brainstormed a HUGE list of adjectives about what we want to be as a class. the puzzle had space for nine adjectives so we narrowed the long list down to the top 9 words. Our final descriptors are: organized, focused, helpful, kind, creative, positive, collaborative, grateful, and successful. 
Creating the puzzle allowed us to practice the “collaborative” aspect right away as we had to meet with several people to discuss how to colour our pieces so that they would fit together seamlessly. It was great watching you all work together and seeing how the puzzle came together! Your collaboration skills certainly shone! It’s a beautiful piece and is hanging in our room as a reminder for us as we move through these next months of this school year.
We dove into our study of Multiplication this week as well. It is very obvious that many of you are working on memorizing your facts and we were SO VERY impressed. The goal of this weeks work centered around helping you recognize multiplication situations and explain why they are multiplication situations.
We asked you to read word problems and decide whether or not they were multiplication problems. If they were, you solved them, if they weren’t, you and your partner had to make the story problem into a multiplication problem. We also worked on identifying fact families. While most of the time you worked with partners or we worked through problems as a large group, next week we will be seeing what you can do independently.
We also began exploring another aspect of measurement: how to calculate perimeter. Perimeter is the distance around an object or shape and to figure out the perimeter of something, you need to add together the length of all the sides. You had some practice time with this concept and both worksheets only needed a bit more time to finish– which you have taken home to get done by Wednesday. We’ll mark them and carry on with more practice next week.
In Language Arts, we worked on our second draft of our Pet Paragraphs. We met with at least 3 other students in the class
to 
have some feedback on our work. Your classmates were giving you some ideas about things they liked but more importantly, things they think you could work on to improve your first drafts. From there, you all prepared a second draft which will now be edited by Mrs. Gil. Hopefully, with a few minor tweaks, next week you will be able to publish the completed paragraphs.
Our oral language skills are being practiced again through a new reader’s theater. “I Resolve” is a short script with 6 readers and is all about New Year’s Resolutions. This time, the script is quite a bit shorter than the one we did before the holidays, so the expectation is a bit higher than previously. This time, you need to memorize your lines! 
Don’t panic… you have until the end of January before we perform for our class (and maybe some other classes too!). You already had two practice sessions this week and there will be more, but don’t forget to also practice at home too!
We embarked on a new Social Studies unit this week! Each of you were given a word on a card and then you shared what you knew or thought you knew about it during a “walk about” around the room. We discovered that each word was actually a name of a place… but we are still figuring out what they are names of. In partners you sorted the 30 names into 5 groups and labelled each grouping with a title or explanation about why those names are in the same category. Next week, we’ll continue learning about some of those names. This actually leads beautifully into your BLOG RESPONSE for this weekend:
Blog Question: Our Social Studies topic has the following letters:
O E A P Y H G R G
Can you unscramble the letters to make ONE word? What is it? What does it mean?
Have a wonderful weekend Division 7!
Mrs. Gil and Mrs. Davis