December 5, 2018

Hello Families,

We had a fantastic experience at Nickle Junior High School on Monday morning! The walk was long and a little tiring trekking through all of the deep, fresh snow, but the learning opportunities made it worth the walk, even for the little legs!

First, our grade 8 buddies took us on a tour of their school. This was really interesting, as we noticed many things in their environment that are very different from ours at Lake Bonavista School. Some of the most notable things included a foods and fashions room, staircases, lockers, a huge gym where the students were running a beep test, and a woodworking shop! We also noticed some things that were the same or only slightly different, such as the staff room, learning commons, and recycling bins. This allowed us to build on our understanding of a school community!

After the tour, our buddies had books written for us about our interests. The big buddies read us their stories and gave us the chance to make changes, revisions and edits where they were needed. We also helped them with the illustrations to go with the stories. On our next visit, in January, they will have the good copies of our stories ready for us to keep!

This week we also started our exploration of number. Yesterday, we introduced number lines, and worked with putting numbers on the lines, then building them with the Montessori colored beads. For students that were successful, additional challenges were added such as skip counting by 2's and 5's using the number line as a reference. We also played the fun and simple game of "silent bunny", ask your child to teach you this one at home (bunny is optional, any soft ball shaped object would work well). We also got a brand new bead cabinet for our classroom, which is perfect timing to assist in our skip counting learning.

We also started a writing task about problem sizes, following the sentence structure, "A small problem is when I ..." . Students were encouraged to think of small, medium, and big problems that could actually happen at school. The next step will be building personalized, effective strategies for how to solve these problems. Tomorrow, our school Occupational Therapist is coming to give us a lesson on social stories, and eventually we will write our own social stories about problems we face.

As a whole school we are collecting donations for the Food Bank. Donations will be accepted until December 19th. As a fun inquiry, I thought it would be fun to build a tower with the donations in our class and then find different ways to measure (math curriculum) the donation tower! If you are able to support this cause, please send donations with your child so we can begin this work!

Take care,
Lindsay Brown