Dear Families,
This past week the students engaged in many activities to promote and inspire the love of reading. One of the days included a visit from a fabulous local author, Pamela McDowell. Her books are written as a narrative non-fiction, focusing on the needs and ecological issues animals are facing. She presented to each group of students about the writing process and how she begins by researching everything she needs to know in order to be accurate when writing her story.
She reminded students during each presentation that there is more information on her blog on her website http://pamelamcdowell.ca/#&panel1-1 They can find info on how a wind turbine works, how scientists attach GPS trackers to ospreys and how software is used to identify individual salamanders. Everything on her website is kid-friendly and child-appropriate.
Students are welcome to contact her with questions at info@pamelamcdowell.ca
For those students interested, order forms will be going home for purchase of her books. Please send EXACT cash only (No cheques - we are unable to provide change) to your child’s teacher no later than Tuesday, May 21st, and within 2 weeks your child will get an autographed copy of the book.
Literacy
Cause and Effect
This week in Literacy we will be exploring Cause-and-Effect relationships in fiction and nonfiction texts.
We will be exploring this comprehension strategy all week using numerous texts and small reading passages.
You can practice this at home by pointing out cause and having them recognize the effect or vice versa as you read:
Robotics
Yesterday and today we got a chance to explore coding and robotics. We practiced many challenges using the Robots and had to do things like get them to move, turn, blink, and respond to our clapping by stacking different blocks of code together.
Today we had a challenge around making our robot walk a square or walk a rectangle by writing appropriate code so that our robot would know what a square or rectangle is and have the right instructions to follow our commands. Ask me what was the most challenging part of this task?
Check IRIS to see if I was able to post a screen shot of my successful code and maybe even a video of my robot!
We will be having more time with the robots and coding challenges in June!
If you would like to practice some coding at home here is a website to experiment with:
https://hourofcode.com/ca/learn
If you would like to practice some coding at home here is a website to experiment with:
https://hourofcode.com/ca/learn
Designing the Perfect East Coast Boat Part 2!
Today we built our second prototype of a perfect East Coast boat. We added more student voice to our rubric and decided to add a few more categories for
-can survive high winds and stormy nor'easters!
-can carry heavy cargo weight (this time using grams and kilogram weights to see how much our boats can carry)
-Can move using air, wind, water or paddle propulsion
On Thursday we will get to test our boats and see how our new design holds up.
If you have materials at home that you meant to bring or boats please bring to class for tomorrow as that will be our last building day before testing!
Today we built our second prototype of a perfect East Coast boat. We added more student voice to our rubric and decided to add a few more categories for
-can survive high winds and stormy nor'easters!
-can carry heavy cargo weight (this time using grams and kilogram weights to see how much our boats can carry)
-Can move using air, wind, water or paddle propulsion
On Thursday we will get to test our boats and see how our new design holds up.
If you have materials at home that you meant to bring or boats please bring to class for tomorrow as that will be our last building day before testing!
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