Category: Uncategorized

Division 9 is using the book The Six Cedar Trees as a catalyst to incorporate indigenous worldviews and perspectives into our learning. The Six Cedar Trees features the core competencies, each represented by an animal (bear, beaver, orca, raven, salmon and wolf) from the Pacific Northwest Coast. As we explore each animal’s characteristics and habits, we learn how we can develop the intellectual, personal, and social and emotional proficiencies that we need in order to engage in deep and life-long learning.   Each animal, and the corresponding core competency, will be introduced at different times throughout the school year.

The first animal that we have learned about is Wolf.  Wolf is a good communicator.  Wolf reminds us to cooperate, listen with respect and share our ideas.  The children of Division 8 have completed a self-assessment of how they see themselves as a communicator; emerging, developing, proficient or extending.   Please visit your child’s blogfolio to view his/her response.

What does math looks like in our classroom?

Most of our time is spent actively practicing new strategies and developing math fluency through hands-on activities, such as games, puzzles etc.  We also work together because cooperative learning encourages different ways of thinking. We can count, show one-to-one correspondence, order and compare numbers, subitize (the ability to quickly identify the number of items in a small set without counting), estimate, decompose numbers (break a number into smaller parts) and form numerals correctly.

Prev

1of9

Next

We read the book What’s My Superpower? by Aviaq Johnston.  This book is about a young Inuk girl named Nalvana.  She loves the idea of superheroes and is curious about what superpower she might have. As Nalvana goes about her days, she identifies and names the special talents or powers of those around her. Some of her friends are able to run swiftly, almost fly in their swings, and carve beautiful ice sculptures, but Nalvana can do none of those things. After spending so long trying to find what she does well, she begins to feel discouraged until her mother points out what she does best – making others feel good about themselves.  This book inspired us to think about our own superpower.

The children were asked to draw a recognizable picture about their own special talent and tell a story about it.  They were also invited to use the letter sounds that they knew to label their drawing or write a sentence about their picture.

The work that you see in your child’s blogfolio was done completely independently.