November is ending!

Hi everyone!

Can you believe that it is the end of November already?  I can't believe how quickly the time is passing!  I hope you all had an amazing week, we did in 3D.

Our week included a great presentation from The Earth Rangers.  We learned a lot about different endangered animals and enjoyed getting to see the animals they brought to visit our school.

In math, we have been practicing identifying and extending growing and shrinking patterns.  We have been focusing on how we can communicate what we know about each pattern and the different ways we can represent them.  We have also been challenging each other to extend our own patterning creations.

We have been continuing to learn about plants through reading, writing and various experiments.  We  created our own flowers to enact the role of a bee in pollination and dissected real flowers.  We wrote about the impact of humans on plant and animal life after the presentation by the Earth Rangers. We have also been reading books on the "Epic" website about photosynthesis and creating our own labeled diagrams with the information we identified as important.






In spelling, we focused on "s" blends and doubling the consonant when adding "ed" after a short vowel-consonant word ending.







Finally, we participated in the Eldorado Excellence Assembly.  Our own K.N. and J.H. received awards for their consistent demonstration of the character trait of respect.  The grade eight students presented a powerful message about bullying and being a bystander as part of Anti-Bullying Awareness week.

This coming week we will be practicing for the winter concert, continuing our work with math communication and patterning, as well as discussing the impact of humans on plants and the environment.

Have a great week!
Ms. Sparling

New Trees, Stop Motion Animation, and Student Led Conferences

Hi everyone!

It has been an exciting week for all of us at Eldorado, as you can probably tell from the title of this blog!  

The week started off with the arrival and planting of our new trees. The trees have been provided to our school thanks to a grant from TD. The students were excited to see the root balls and talk to the nursery staff about planting at this time of the year.  We are looking forward to our beautiful new trees growing and providing shade on our yard!




In math we continued to fine tune our pumpkin graphs.  Learning about the importance of the title and proper labeling (especially of our units of measurement) so that others can understand what data we are presenting.





We also worked on our first  "Mashup Math" challenge.  
Can you figure out the value of Donkey Kong, the bananas and the barrel?







With "Bullying Awareness Week" approaching we took some time to think about how we can each demonstrate kindness in various aspects of our lives.  Each of the students completed a "#choose Action Pledge" and shared their promise with our class, as well as, with the rest of the school.  








In the Innovation Studio, the class worked in partners to complete a series of stop motion video clips.  Mr. J complied the clips into a 1 minute film called "Rich 'n Roll".  You can find it on Twitter @MisterJsWorld or I have retweeted it on my account @MsSparlingpdsb. 

Finally I want to say a HUGE "Thank you!" to all of you who were able to come and join the students and I for the student led conferences. I know the students enjoyed getting to show off some of their work and sharing their goals for the rest of the term.  For those of you who were not able to make it in this week I look forward to connecting with you soon.

Have a great weekend!
Ms. Sparling

Remembering

Hello,

I hope you all had an amazing week and took the time to reflect on what peace means to you this Remembrance Day week.  I know that I am grateful for all the sacrifices made that allow me to live in a country where peace is the norm.

In class this week we continued to work with our one remaining pumpkin.  We are turned it into a work of art using our knowledge of lines and experimenting with the lines out of the two dimensional realm.

We have also been graphing the measurements we recorded of the other pumpkins to see if they might have helped us to make better predictions about the number of seeds each pumpkin contained.


In DPA we rediscovered the website Go Noodle.  The students were showing me all their best dance moves.

In spelling this week, we focused on words beginning with "r" consonant blends, as well as, how to pluralize words ending in "sh" or "ch".  I hope everyone studied this week as we will be having our spelling test tomorrow morning.

Thank you to everyone who donated so generously to the "We Scare Hunger Food Drive".  We have been graphing the food brought in as we begin to investigate the Canadian Food Rainbow in health.  We have also been learning about child hunger here in Canada.

We have also continued to work with money in math.

In the Innovation Studio we focused on the Green Screen, wandering through a forest of bean plants and turning into super heroes. Even the teachers tried it out.

 









The students also had the opportunity to create Google Slides about what Remembrance Day means to them.  We will be fine tuning them this coming week and they will becoming to a device near you soon.

I hope you all have a great start to the week and I look forward to seeing you at the student led conferences on Thursday and Friday.  Please make sure you check the Progress Report envelope for your scheduled time.

Have a good evening,
Ms. Sparling

The First Week of November

Hello,

I hope that you have all had an amazing week! We did here, in portable 4.

We finished the last of our Golden Eagle presentations. We enjoyed learning about A.T.'s passion for basketball.  T.J. shared her "Twister" game which helps her to keep healthy and fit.  G.K. shared her "Shoppie" doll.  She likes to play with it when her friends are busy.  L.N. presented the car he and his father made together when he was studying simple machines in grade two.  As always it was amazing to getting to know a little more about what makes each of us unique.

In writing, we focused on writing a recount about our choice of Diwali, the Hallowe'en parade at school or Hallowe'en evening.  We used the "Recount Song" to remind us of the components of a recount and attempted to apply some of our knowledge of paragraphing which we have built through our shared writing of the Golden Eagle presentations.

Math and science this week were all based around our pumpkin inquiries. We measured the circumference of our different pumpkins, weighed them (converting the weight from pounds to kilograms!) and counted the number of creases on each one.  We then used that information to make predictions about which pumpkin would have the most seeds.  Next we cut open the pumpkins and collected all of the seeds.  We took the time to record what we saw, smelled, felt and heard when the pumpkins were whole and as we emptied them of their seeds. We then looked at the seeds from each pumpkin and estimated how many seeds there were.  Finally we tried a variety of strategies to count and record the actual number of seeds.  Boy were some of our estimates off!  Those pumpkins had a lot of seeds!

This week we will be reflecting on whether the circumference, weight or number of creases were predictive of the number of seeds in a given pumpkin or not.  We also hope to be able to utilize our remaining, intact pumpkin as the basis of some line art.

Eldorado's "Me to We" club began its food drive this past Friday.  We have started to collect non-perishable foods for local food banks.  This has inspired our class to start discussing healthy verses non-healthy foods.  We will be continuing these discussions over the next couple of weeks and would appreciate any food flyers that you may have laying around that we could use as part of our health and math studies.


We visited the "Innovation Studio" for the second of our four weeks of exploration.  This week we focused on creating stop motion animation using the "Lego Movie" app and just one piece of Lego.  We also entered our first piece of work into our on-line portfolios using the Seesaw app as our platform.  We hope that you all had a chance to check out our work.

Finally, we would like to extend a warm welcome to A.K. our newest member of 3D.  We hope that you will enjoy being a part of our learning community!

Have a great week,
Ms. Sparling