Hello Everyone!

Happy Leap Day! I always think about those with birthdays on February 29 and imagine how exciting it must be to celebrate your birthday on the actual day every four years!

I am also excited for March to be here as I feel like the beginnings of Spring are in the air! This Winter hasn’t felt too long, yet it’s always nice to have Spring to look forward to!

We’ve been busy over the past few weeks and as always…have lots of exciting learning opportunities coming up!

-We had a wonderful time in the forest with Mr. Barret Miller! He has a wealth of knowledge and we are so fortunate to have made this connection with Barret and will be making arrangements for him to either meet us in the forest or at the school again soon! Last week Barret talked to us about our local forest and its inhabitants. He helped us to track some animal prints, see how old a tree was and reminded us of our impact as part of the people who share the forest. He also reminded us of how lucky we are to live in a city with so many natural spaces available to learn from and discover.

-Our “official” fractions investigation has come to an end for now! Although…we will continue to infuse fractions in natural ways in all aspects of our learning! Some students continue to be challenged with counting by halves and quarters and ordering fractions. We will continue to support these learners at school and encourage you to check in with your children at home as well! This also applies to addition and subtraction, especially when questions require regrouping. As we dive deeper into multiplication we will focus less on concepts we have previously focussed on, but not stop practicing them entirely as we still want students to be able be confident in their skills.

-Our animal research/informational writing projects are well underway! The research portion is done and about half of the students have completed their first drafts. This writing will reflect their learning from our Common Learning Times and the features we delved into (Openings, Closings, Listing vs Layering and “TAP”ping into voice). I will be helping the students with their writing as they need, however will not be doing a final edit of their work as I often do. As students finish, they will be writing a narrative piece which will include the animal they’ve studied. I will edit this writing with the students and we will have an opportunity to see self edited vs teacher edited work. These will be some of work pieces that the students will share at the up coming conferences.

-Conference notes will be going home on Monday and need to be returned ASAP as we will be coordinating the conferences this week. You will receive your time with your child’s report card on March 9.

-Our “First Chapter Fridays” have been going great! I really love doing this with the students. I think we will continue for March and then see if we want to switch gears after that!

-We are about half way through The Wild Robot! I hope your children have talked about the book at home, and if not ask them what they think! Roz is a robot who ended up on an island after the cargo ship she was on crashed. She was turned on accidentally by some curious otters and has had to learn how to adapt to the island and live among the plants and animals. I can’t wait to share the rest of the book with the class…and maybe the sequel!

This upcoming week will include some “ketchup” work on our animal projects (writing and art) as well as…a more in-depth look at multiplication. So far we’ve learned how to relate skip counting and repeated addition to multiplication and how it is more efficient to use multiplication, and “factor X factor=the product”. The grade 4s are recalling some facts they learned last year and the grade 3s are excited to learn facts of their own!

We will continue to talk about healthy habits, the most current version of Canada’s Food Guide and using nutritional labels to learn more about what we are eating. I made a suggestion to the students that this weekend they take a food like: crackers and look at two nutritional labels and try to decide which one they think is the healthiest option to eat. When we ere looking at the Froot Loops label we noticed that we have to look at the serving size as the nutrition is based on that amount!

We will also get outside with Erin and practice some Friluftsliv in our own schoolyard! It will be a great week ahead!

Until next time,

Danielle