First Week of In-Person Learning for 2021

 First Week of In-Person Learning for 2021

January 15th, 2021

Hello and welcome back to in-person learning!

First, I want to share how incredibly proud I am of this group of kids. They went out of their way every day to help me with any questions I had, shared what they needed from me to be most successful, and worked extremely hard on their assignments. We will be focusing a lot this second half of the year on life skills that will prepare them for junior high and building independence - based on what I saw this week, they're off to a great start!

Please note: While students are not writing PATs this year, we will still be looking at practice exams and older PAT material to work on skills like test-taking (especially multiple choice), note-taking, and working through multi-step word problems for math. All the practice, none of the pressure!

Here's what we worked on this week:

Gym & Music: The kids continued our short and long distance running unit by brainstorming all the different tag games they know. We will be using a "march madness"-style bracket to play 2 different types a day to find out what is the ultimate tag game. In music, we listened to the Mandelorian to review tempo. We also received our handbells and gloves to start preparing for the Spring Concert. 

Math: This week and next will be a review of units taught during the first half of the year and number sense concepts. 

• We practiced reading and writing ordered coordinate pairs to make a picture on a grid
• We talked about how math problems are a lot like puzzles and take patience and a positive attitude towards learning from mistakes. We each attempted to solve these puzzles in our own way and shared our strategies and corrections with others. We also talked about how efficient and accurate our chosen strategies were.
• We did our fast facts for the month and attempted a math PAT Part A practice exam to review larger addition, subtraction, multiplication and division questions with and without decimals
• We used a pretend treasure map to navigate a ship around a grid using translations, rotations and reflections.         

ELA: Our guided reading groups have selected their new novels to read. We spent this week practicing summarizing, note-taking using headlines, paraphrasing information into our own words, and writing newspaper articles. 

Science: We reviewed the phases of the moon and the kids were able to view the phases changing during an experiment with a dark room, a flashlight (the sun) and a white volleyball (the moon). We also played a game of Jeopardy to review other Sky Science topics. 

Social: Continuing from online school, we spent more time learning about La Grande Prix de Montreal (The Great Peace of Montreal). Students used an article and a highlighter to find key information, grouped their facts together under headings that made sense, took notes using their headlines by putting their highlighted facts into their own words, and finally wrote their own newspaper article. We also held a mock election to review the election process, party platforms and the importance of being an informed voter by having students brainstorm important issues they would solve if they were elected and voting for a member of our class whose platform best matched our own values. 

Congratulations to S.M-P, our 6B Leader and winner of our election!