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.
Your genre projects are due on Monday and so many of you have taken home some poster board and work to finish up your work. Eight of you already completed the posters and they look amazing! Of those 8 posters there are 7 genres to learn about, that is incredible. We are hopeful learning about these genres will inspire you to try new books that you might not normally grab of the library shelf! 
We have begun our career studies that focus on money and business. This week, we were introduced to some key vocabulary like income, skills, financial institutions, interest, deposit, withdrawals, and salary. It was interesting to hear all the different ways you “earn” money and also, how you save it. 
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!
Our science explorations this term are going to be centered around Newton’s Laws of Motion and the Scientific Method. We are going to use the skills we learned first term when we completed our gummy worm experiments to try our hand at experimenting with our questions about force and motion. 
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.
We are studying Patterns and Equations in math this term. We have already explored how to express and extend patterns. Now we are working on writing and solving expressions and equations with variables. It was impressive to see how ALL of you really understood this concept and were able to solve for the unknown variable quite easily. Next week, we will be exploring more patterns using tables and also using variables to write pattern rules.
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!
In gym we began exploring basketball skills. You were very impressive in how quickly you picked up bounce and chest passes. The dribbling is coming along nicely as is the shooting skills. 
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!
To round out our busy and productive week, we started and completed a multi-media art piece. Our hot chocolate mugs turned out so cute and are already adding a nice pop of cheerful colour to our hallway bulletin board! Those of you who are still working on yours, please take whatever spare time you have next week to finish and add them to our display. 
Monday is Black Excellence Day. We are asking that students wear black t-shirts on Monday to celebrate Black contributions, achievements, stories, art and history. In preparation for that we are focusing on Viola Desmond and her contributions to Canada and the civil rights movement. 
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.
Your blog response for this weekend is:
What 3 words would you use to describe Viola Desmond? Explain why you chose those words.
Have a wonderful weekend Division 6! Stay warm… it’s going to be a COLD one!
Mrs. Gil and Mrs. Davis