Jumpin’ around

This week has been jam packed with all kinds of fun activities and assignments. We had our second buddy session in preparation for Jump Rope 4 Heart that is coming up in a few weeks. You are amazing role models and teachers! So many of the buddies have learned and gained confidence in their jumping skills because of this time they have spent with you! We will have one more session next week to help prepare them for the event. Have you signed up to fundraise online yet? The link is easily found on the school’s website if you are interested.

We started the week off with a few days of learning and reflecting on Reconciliation and why it is so important for us here, at Brentwood Park. You were introduced to The Project of Heart plans and we asked you to spend some time thinking about what Reconciliation looks like for you personally.  After watching some videos, listening to a story, and analyzing some quotes and poems from Residential school survivors, you all created some amazing drafts of the artwork we will be creating next Tuesday morning. Every student in the school will create a small cedar tile that will be included in a mural that will be put up in the school’s main hallway, near the office and library. We were very proud and impressed with the designs and symbols you came up with. So much power in just a few words and symbols.

We were complimented by a few of the Grade 6/7 teachers who had been reading the completed Extreme Environment essays that are now on display outside our classroom.You should all be very proud and excited to know that the teachers, who may become your teacher next year, are looking forward to having you because they were so impressed by your essays. They said the essays were very well organized, had clear sub-topics, transitions between paragraphs, and were overall very creative and engaging! Pat yourselves on the back Division 6, you are doing great things and are getting noticed.

Our poetry writing continued this week as we explored another new  poetry: The ABC poem. This is a five line poem that describes a strong emotion. Why ABC? you ask… excellent question because the format of this poem is that the first four lines are in alphabetical order.  Whatever letter the first line started with, the next 3 lines have to start with the next letter of the alphabet. The last line can start with any letter of the alphabet and finishes off the poem.  We wrote one as a class that went like this:

Super Excited/ To go to Disneyland/ Unusual rides to experience and foods to taste/ Vacation to California/ Cannot wait to get there!

Our research on Canadian government concluded this week and you are now moving on to creating a power point presentation to share what you learned. Your notes are your guide to what needs to be included… but remember that a power point is an AID to a presentation and should contain prompts and images that will trigger your memory so that you can EXPLAIN what you learned about the level of government you have been researching.  We’ll chat about this a bit more next week, but be sure to spend some time at home working on this project… the due date will sneak up on us pretty quickly!

Just an FYI for those of you who want to earn a bit of EXTRA credit and go beyond… there is an extension activity on TEAMS for you to explore.  Have fun with that– there are some cool activities that will give you even more information about our government and how it works.

This week we continued our Body Science studies and got down to the “nitty gritty” as they say. This week we asked you to look at diagrams of the reproductive anatomy of both females, and males. You learned the important vocabulary terminology for the important sexual organs that many of you speak of in slang. It is important to not be embarrassed to talk about the reproductive organs as it is important that you know what things are called and what functions they have in the human body. That way, if something is going wrong or does not feel right, you can get the help you need and express yourself clearly. We asked you to define the important parts of each reproductive system as well as locate the parts on the diagrams. We are very impressed with how maturely you are all engaging in these science lessons. It is understandable that we giggle and laugh sometimes, it helps us get through the lessons, but overall, you are all learning lots and participating respectfully. Well done!

It is Novel Study time!!! This week we started our class novel, The Boy at the Back of the Class. We spent some time predicting what the book would be about, only using the cover page for clues. You all made some great inferences and guesses about the possible Plot, Setting, and Characters. We have only read Chapter 1 so far, but in that one chapter, we uncovered that most of our predictions seem to be right on the money! Next week will dive deeper into the story and see what happens…..

Our Digital Literacy studies this week moved from Cyberbullying to Online scams and Phishing. You are all very aware of many of the pitfalls of online scams. We discussed the 7 red flags of phishing, do you remember any of them? We also asked you to think about the best ways to avoid falling into the traps. You all were able to come up with these top three ways:

• don’t click any links
• don’t reply or forward
• don’t open attachments

So, your Blog Response question this week is, HOW MANY RED FLAGS CAN YOU REMEMBER? In your assignment this weekend, list as many Phishing red flags as you can….remember, there are 7 we learned about, can you remember them all????

Have a great weekend everyone!

Mrs. Davis and Mrs. Gil