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Division 4 2023-2024

Month: December 2020

Number the Stars

December 16, 2020 /

Students have just finished reading the historical fiction novel, Number the Stars. This novel is about two families living in Denmark during the German occupation of WWII. Annemarie’s best friend, Ellen and her family are Jewish and need to escape Denmark to avoid persecution. Will Annemarie and her family be able to get them to Sweden before it’s too late?

The guiding questions students considered while reading the novel were:

  • What is personal freedom and why is it important in your life? Why is it essential to protect the freedom of others even if your own is not threatened?
  • How did WWII affect the lives of those who lived through it? What lessons can people today take from that historical event?

Please visit your child’s blogfolio to see their personal reflection.

Français

December 11, 2020 /

In French this term, we reviewed numbers to 50, months and days of the week, colours and some simple conversational expressions. Students are able to understand and respond to phrases like:

Comment t’appelles tu?                        Je m’appelle________.

Comment ça va?                     Ca va bien…mal…comme ci comme ça.

Quelle est la date aujourd’hui?             La date est…

Quel âge as tu?                                    J’ai ______ ans.

Now, we are learning vocabulary and expressions to talk about family members, activities and celebrations. Students have shared their family portraits on their blogfolios.

Memoir Writing

December 11, 2020 /

This term, with the help of Ms. Liu, we have been working on memoir writing. By writing memoirs, the students were able to write about things that are very familiar and important to them.

Students wrote and shared at least three memoirs. First, they chose to write about an object that was special to them. Then, they wrote a memoir about a place in their life that was familiar and important and finally, they wrote about a person they were close to.

Everyone chose one memoir to revise, edit and publish. Students learned to separate their writing into paragraphs and use details and examples to make their writing more interesting to you, the reader. Please look at your child’s blogfolio to read their published memoir.

Math Term I

December 7, 2020 /

This term, the grade 5 math students have focused on two of the Big Ideas in the curriculum: Identifying regularities in number patterns that can be expressed in tables, and computational fluency and flexibility with numbers that extend to operations with larger (multi-digit) numbers. Additionally, students further developed their basic math fluency skills by practicing basic addition, subtraction and multiplication facts.

At the beginning of the term, students learned to identify number patterns and write pattern rules. After that they were able to develop expressions using a variable to describe a pattern. Finally, students used patterns to write and solve one-step equations with a variable and could express a given problem as an equation, using symbols (e.g., 4 + X = 15).

Later in the term, they worked with whole numbers to 1 000 000 and used different strategies like front-end rounding, compatible numbers, benchmarks and compensation to estimate sums and differences. Finally, they used these strategies to solve problems in real-life contexts and problem-based situations.

Erika’s Story and Naomi’s Tree

December 3, 2020 /

                                     

In Social Studies and Language Arts this term we have been looking at injustices faced by different minority groups, mostly during the period around World War II. Students completed inquiry projects, researching questions they had about the war. Some of these questions were: Why did Japan attack Pearl Harbor? How did different countries communicate during the war? Why did Hitler want to take over Europe? Which countries were occupied and how did the war end?

Students read two picture books, Erika’s Story and Naomi’s Tree and identified similarities and differences in the experiences of the young girls in each story. Both of these books are true stories of the lives of the protagonists, one in Germany and one in Vancouver, during the war.

The comparisons made in these stories led us to look more locally at Canada’s historic treatment of different minority groups and examples of past discriminatory government policies and actions. We have specifically been learning about British Columbia’s treatment of Japanese Canadians during World War II.

 

 

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