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The core competencies in our new BC curriculum focus on the intellectual, personal and social skills that are an important for 21st century learners. One of those core competencies is personal and cultural identity. It involves building an awareness, understanding, and appreciation of who we are and how our relationships and culture have helped shape who we are as individuals. Over the past week, we’ve put lots of thought into choosing different artifacts that represent our family, our culture, our peers and ourselves, and have reflected on why/how the artifacts are important to us. We then shared our artifacts with the class. It has been amazing to hear everyone’s stories and see everyone so engaged. A highlight of the week for sure! This week we also had a visit from our PE helping teacher. He led a great discussion about the health benefits of being physically active. Regular exercise has shown to reduce the risk of several physical illnesses, including some cancers and diabetes, as well as several mental health illnesses, such as depression, stress, and anxiety – so it’s important for all of us! Although it is recommended that we exercise regularly, many of us don’t take the required number of steps needed in a day in order to be considered “active”. Our helping teacher brought along a class set of pedometers and taught us basic steps on how to use them. Next week we’re going to track our physical activity to see how many steps we take in a school day to find out how active we are. We’ll be gathering data, so we’ll also be using graphs to represent our steps. So stay tuned!
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We have a group of creative and passionate students – clearly shown with our completed paper blogs! It was now time to have a discussion about leaving quality comments on each other’s blog posts. We brainstormed several ideas in small groups prior to sharing them with the class. Here’s what we came up with:
With our “blog comment etiquette” established, it was now time to read each other’s posts and to use our guidelines to make meaningful comments. It was great to see the students so engaged while reading and leaving comments. When we reflected on the activity afterwards, it was clear that the students had taken ownership of their blogs. In the next few weeks it will be exciting to see our digital blogs get up and running so that we can share ideas with those in and outside our classroom. We got started with the Daily 5 this week by introducing the first Daily 5 choice “Read to Self.” Although reading to ourselves sounds easy, we live in a world with so many distractions that sometimes it’s hard for us to stay focused! We had a discussion about our need to build stamina while reading independently and we took the time to model inappropriate and appropriate behaviour during the activity. By taking the time to act out the behaviours, students could clearly identify what they need to stay focused while reading. We came up with a behaviour framework that includes “I statements” such as: “I can stay in one spot” and “I can read the whole time.” One of the Curricular Competencies in Science involves making observations and generating questions about the natural world. Before starting our activity, we had a great class discussion about asking questions and making inferences, two strategies often used in Reading. In fact, they are thinking strategies (not just reading strategies) that can apply to all curricular areas. To get started, we went outside and started making observations about the natural world. One student was curious about the bark on the trees, whereas another student was curious about the clouds in the sky. Lots of different ideas were shared and we will continue next week. Our next step is to find answers to our questions. "The important thing is to not stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing." -Albert Einstein Here are a few other things that we've been up to: Making monsters that include different shapes and colours: Using unifix cubes to build our conceptual understanding of factors & multiples: Reflecting on our needs (from the teacher, other students and ourselves) in order for us to be our best selves: A great week of learning in division 2 :)
I would like to welcome you into our classroom and I hope that you can get a true snapshot of the exciting things that are happening in our classroom. An important part of a classroom is feeling a sense of belonging and community. Each day starts with a talking circle so that we can build respect, responsibility and relationships in our classroom. Talking circles come are born out of indigenous teachings. Everyone has their turn to speak, but when we aren’t holding the taking piece, we need to listen respectfully to what the speaker is saying. Talking circles allow us to get to know each other, ourselves and where we belong. And it a classroom, that’s important. We also spent time brainstorming what we value and we need in a classroom. We generated lots of excellent ideas that we shared as a group and we worked collaboratively to determine which were most important to us. We have common themes in the needs and values that we chose – respect, inclusivity, self-regulation and kindness – that will allow us to be our best selves. Our poster that we all signed will be on display in our classroom in case we need reminders :) To introduce the world of blogging, we got started by making our own individual paper blogs. We took time to explore online blogs and we discussed different parts of it, including titles, sidebars, links, etc. Our first blog post is a writing activity so we spent time discussing the learning intention and the criteria of the activity prior to getting started. Learning intention: I can communicate my ideas in a blog post Criteria:
Our first blog post was going to be about something that are passionate about. It could be “an introduction to me” or it could be “tips on…” and because students could choose, they were motivated and able to come up with creative ideas to write about! Our paper blogs will be finished on Monday, so we’ll discuss how and why to comment on blogs – and we’ll do so using post-it notes. Follow us on twitter to see what else is happening: It's been a great first week and I'm looking forward to including you in our exciting journey together :)
Welcome to Division 2. It's great to be back to school! We've had a hectic first week in grade seven, but have spent time doing different activities and by Friday afternoon were finally settling into our classes. One of the activities we did involved Math. When we think of Math, we often think of some basic operations – adding, subtracting, multiplying or dividing. Or fractions and decimals might come to mind. One of the “Big Ideas” in the new grade 6 and 7 curriculum can include all of those concepts is data analysis. Data surrounds us in the real-world, so one of my goals is to provide a variety of opportunities to use different operations in Math while gathering, displaying and interpreting that data. Big Idea: “Data can be used to illustrate proportion and to compare and interpret.” Glyphs is one way to do that. One of our activities this week required us to gather data about ourselves and then to display that data on a face using different shapes or colours (including eyes, nose, mouth, freckles and hair). For example, if our birthday is in January, February or March, we needed to have blue hair. Birthdays in May, June, July or August needed red hair. And birthdays in September, October, November and December needed yellow hair. Once our glyphs were created and displayed, it was time to start analyzing and interpreting them. We looked for similarities and differences between the glyphs and we asked some excellent questions. Many looked for patterns while others tried to determine percentages of students who liked certain music. It was rewarding to see students so engaged in the activity and to overhear comments such as “I didn’t know Math could be fun” (music to a teacher's ears!). Our Glyph activity:
LEARNING INTENTION: I can communicate data by graphing CRITERIA:
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AuthorWe are a curious group of kids who are excited to share our learning with you! Archives
March 2020
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