Happy Holidays!

We had a great time together in class this morning!

We played one of our favourite Math games, "YAHOO," except today we opted for the more festive names,
"NEIGE" and "SANTA!"

We then created very expressive snowmen using our thumbs, white paint, sharpies and our imaginations!



We also took time to find our "Elf Name" and eat some yummy cookies, cake and veggies
that our classmates brought in the share.

What a great way to kick-off our winter break!

Wishing you all a very wonderful holiday and a happy and healthy new year!
Meilleurs voeux!

Winter Wednesday!

We started our day together in the gym celebrating our Term 1 successes.
Congratulations to all our classmates who participated and were recognized in this morning's assembly!

In class, we celebrated the first day of winter sipping hot chocolate as we practiced our "cartesian plane skills" to create a very special mystery character.

We finished off the morning reading "Comment le Grinch a volé Noël" and watching more vidéoclip projects.

What a great morning! :)

P.S. Don't forget to wear your pjs tomorrow!

Holi-day Tuesday!

We practiced our coordinate skills by playing Math battleship in class today!
Finding the "Tube" ship was definitely the hardest as it is only one coordinate big!

In Français we started watching our vidéoclip projects. It was certainly strange to see our faces being projected onto the whiteboard! We will continue to watch our projects in class tomorrow.

We also made one of our last Tomatosphere observations in class this morning. Group D has 34 germinated seeds and Group F has 30 germinated seeds. Anyone wanting to bring their tomato plants home before the holiday break is more than welcome to do so. Please note that the tiny plants will NOT do well with extreme temperature changes and should be wrapped up to keep the cold air at bay. Any 'unclaimed' plants will be brought home to Mme Careen's house for the 2 week break and then returned in January.
Any remaining, living plants will be repotted at school early in the New Year.

A reminder that tomorrow morning (at 9:00am) is our school-wide Celebration of Success assembly.
It is also "Winter Wonderland Wednesday" so be sure to dress-up in your cozy, warm winter gear!

Have a great afternoon, everyone! :)

Information Overload!

There are a lot of things happening at school this week.

Take a quick read to see what's happening!

1. Students will be completing a short survey in class tomorrow morning with Mme Marcoux. A synervoice was sent home about this last week and a letter (on orangey coral paper) was handed out in class today for all students to bring home to share with you. We are asking that you please initial the letter and send it back with your child tomorrow. All students will complete the survey UNLESS we receive an email or phone call indicating that you would rather not have your child participate. Thank you very much for your help with this!

2. We will begin watching our videoclip projects tomorrow in class! Any students who have not yet completed the editing of their project must make arrangements to work in the tech lab over noon hour to ensure their work is complete.

3. Celebration of Success Assembly! We will gather in the gym 9:00am Wednesday morning to celebrate our many successes of Term 1. You are more than welcome to join us if you are free!

4. The last morning before break! While we will not be having a "formal" holiday party, we will have a chance to do some fun and engaging curricular activities as a class Thursday morning. Any students who would like to bring a snack or sweet treat to share with their classmates are certainly invited to do so. 

Please remember to keep the snacks peanut/tree nut free!

5. Thursday afternoon! All students will be participating in activity stations Thursday afternoon, starting period 6. Students had the opportunity to sign up for their activities in class this morning an the afternoon schedule will be posted as soon as it is ready.

6. And now, for what we did this morning!

This morning we continued working on plotting coordinates on a cartesian plane. Some of us finished creating our coordinate art, while others challenged a partner to a coordinates game. Using dice to roll coordinates, we plotted points of a cartesian plane. The first person able to plot three coordinates in a row was the winner!

In Science, we continued graphing the data we collected last week in our "How many push-ups can you do in 1 minute" experiment. We learned how to scale the x and y axes to better accommodate the results of our experiment. We also reviewed how to write a title and sub-titles for our graph. And, when our lesson was done, we took some time to draw a creative masterpiece on our white boards!

Have a great afternoon, everyone!

See you in your 'holi-day' gear tomorrow! :)

Spirit Week!

We're closing out 2016 with a whole lotta Holly Jolly!
Here are the dress-up days for this coming Spirit Week!

Monday, December 19: Jersey Day - Wear a sports jersey/sports gear!

Tuesday, December 20: Holly-day / Holiday - Dress as your favourite holiday!

Wednesday, December 21: Winter Wednesday - Wear tuques, mittens, scarves, your fav sweater, etc!

Thursday, December 22: Pyjama Day - You're welcome! :)

Looking forward to a great week!
Stay warm! :)

Vidéoclips!

The time has arrived for us to pick our favourite vidéoclip! 

We have listened to such a wide variety of music over the past couple of weeks that it will be hard to choose only 1.

Below is the list of songs we listened to as a class. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kmuR-F0o_sw

33Tours (2frères)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9GCM9DZUJo

Un homme debout (Claudio Capéo)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VV5oVYVGfNc

On écrit sur les murs (Kids United)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DQH1HlQeHdo

L’oiseau et l’enfant (Kids United)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kQysGibXphE

J’ai cherché (Amir)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03X9u3v9DAM

Quand la musique est bonne (Génération Goldman)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUCJhD_2zmA

En feu (Soprano)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ROChfigwihw

Laissez-les kouma (Zaho)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60UcfvjiVY8

Emmène-moi (Boulevard des airs)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eTb5jNgOVag

Folle de toi (Raffy)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U-Z_bZS8t3M

Sur ma route (Black M)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YPCTWcxPTug

Les points sur les I (Grégoire)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EE3fpSS3hlI

Après toi (Christophe Willem)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8IjWHBGzsu4

On ira (Zaz)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gejgbJqawVw

Omniprésent (Damien Robitaille)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zrAJHBHOVvU
Nos joies répétitives (Pierre Lapointe)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QzaNb_CIglk
Appelle quand tu te réveilles (Renan Luce)

Here are the QR codes and the list of songs we listened to with our iPads.

We will need to know our favourite song in order to start our critical thinking writing piece in class tomorrow. We will start by creating a shared writing piece as a class and then students will be tasked with completing and editing their own writing. Stay tuned for more exciting info!

Have great afternoon! :)

Snow Day #2

The snow keeps on falling and we keep on learning... and having fun, too!

We started our morning together with another round of "Skyscrapers." 

This makes our brains work SO hard! 

Next in Math, we put our Math brains and our creative brains together to create winter/holiday themed factor trees! We each chose a number and broke the number down into its prime factors. After checking our Math with Mme Careen, we got to work on our artistic creations!

Math is so beautiful!

We finished our morning listening/watching more vidéoclips in French. We used the iPads to scan QR codes and watched the vidéoclips by ourselves or with a partner.
Each of the 4 vidéoclips were all very different in genre of music and style of video.
We will each be picking our favourite song/vidéoclip at the end of the week.
It'll be hard to choose after seeing so many different ones!

⛄ Wishing you all a nice, snowy evening. ⛄

Snow Day!

We celebrated our first "Snow Day" by writing snow and winter-themed Haiku!
Haiku require a specific syllable count: 5 - 7 - 5.
It's not always easy writing descriptive verses when limited by syllables, but with some hard thinking and some revisions, we each created a unique piece of writing!

❄ Stay warm! ❄

Happy Monday!

We had a great start to our week!

In Math, after correcting our assigned Math practice questions (mental math and factor trees), we listened to a story! Mme Careen read us, "Sir Cumference and the Viking's Map" written by Cindy Neuschwander. This story is all about Catersian planes (les plans cartésiens) and how to locate specific coordinates on a map; a great introduction to our next topic in Math (and Science, too)!

After listening to the story, we did our Math lesson on erasable white boards instead of paper. So fun! We learned how to draw the X and Y axes, where to place the Point of Origin (0,0) and that both positive and negative numbers can be found on a Cartesian plane. We also started to plot the coordinate points shared in the story and will continue working on that in class tomorrow.

In Français, we continue to read daily as well as work on our "On corrige" sentences which help us learn and practice the different masculine/feminine and singular/plural rules. We are also continuing with our francophone music unit, which had us listening/watching 3 different vidéoclips today: Laissez-les kouma by Zaho, On ira by Zaz and 33 tours by 2 frères. All 3 songs were from different genres and had different styles of vidéoclips.

Tomorrow in class we will watch our last "batch" of vidéoclips before beginning our music opinion iPad project that we'll work on and present to the class before winter break.
(More info about this very exciting project is coming soon)!

Have a great week, everyone!

Our December class photo!

A great first week of Term 2!

We've had a great week of learning this week!

In Math we've reviewed prime and composite numbers and learned how to break numbers down into their prime factors by drawing factor trees! We learned that no matter what 2 factors we start with, the list of prime factors at the end is always the same! Wow!

In Science, we continue our daily observations of our tomato plants. Group F is slowly starting to catch up to Group D with the total number of tomato seeds germinated. We've noticed that our plants get very dry quite quickly so need to be watered almost daily. We've also started to talk about graphing and will focus on developing this skill over the next couple of weeks.

In Français, we're continuing with our daily sentence correction, "On corrige" and have also continued with our investigation of francophone music by watching a wide variety of vidéoclips. 

On Tuesday we completed an activity with the iPads that had us scanning QR codes to find different vidéoclips on line. We watched a total of 12 different vidéoclips and then had to choose our 4 favourites to write about. We included a brief description of the vidéoclip message as well as our opinion of both the song and the vidéoclip itself. We are working hard to use our new music-themed vocabulary when sharing our opinions. This week we will be looking to add more words to our vocabulary list that we can use in addition to the word "bon."

We finished off the week with a team "Gratte-ciels" challenge. Using randomized groupings (we chose a card from a deck of cards to find our group members... all aces or 4s together, for example) we worked together to solve the puzzles. This made our brains work SO hard! Ask me about the activity; what went well and what got us stumped?!

Have a great weekend! :)

Weekend tomatoes!

Good evening everyone!
Just checking in with a quick tomato update!

1) Our school sure is chilly on the weekend! The thermometer was showing a cool 15℃! Brrr!
2) Our plants were getting a bit dry, so I added some water to the bottom of the 'green house' trays.
3) A few more seeds have germinated! Hooray!

I can't wait to see what tomorrow's observations will be!
See you soon! :)

P.S. Don't forget November Scholastic orders are due tomorrow! And, our 4th mental math assessment - "additionner par valeur de position" - is tomorrow, too!

What video do you prefer?

Today in Français, it was all about the song, Papaoutai.
Before locker break, we danced to the Just Dance version. Then, during Français, we watched 2 different vidéoclips; the original vidéoclip by Stromae and the Pentatonix version.
After watching each vidéoclip, we made a list of what we liked and did not like about each videoclip,
being sure to justify our opinion.

At the end of the class we voted for our favourite vidéoclip, and the original by Stromae won (by a lot)!

What vidéoclip do you prefer and why?

An update of our week!

It's hard to believe that tomorrow is already the last day of Term 1! Where did the time go?

Here's a quick look at what we've been up to this week...

📚 Biblio! 📚

We love Day 5s when we visit the library with M. Sorokowski! We have a chance to read and check out books in both English and French! M. Sorokowski reads a ton of books and always has a new title ready to recommend!

🍅 Tomatoes! 🍅

Our tomato plants have started to germinate! We continue to make daily observations and, with the results we have already seen, have our own predictions as to which group is our control group and which is our experimental tomato group.

🎶 La musique francophone! 𝅃🎶

We have started a mini unit on music and have been listening to different francophone musicians in class. We have also been watching the vidéoclips (music videos) that go with each song. With each song we listen to, we have the opportunity to share our opinion of both the song and the video, using different sentence starters and the proper music vocabulary.

Over the next month, we will continue developing our critical thinking skills by reviewing a wide range of francophone music and supporting our opinions with specific details and references. Here is a link to one of the videos we watched in class today: "J'ai cherché" by Amir. Some of us found the video inspirational and thought the song had a good beat; others suggested the song was too repetitive and thought the video was depressing. Most of us liked that the refrain was in both French and English (not too common for francophone artists), but a couple of us thought that the English/French combo did not mesh well at all. 

Click on the link and take a look.... what do you think?

Weekend Tomatoes!

A special weekend Tomatosphere check in!

No germinated seeds yet, but a few are getting REALLY close!

We also have a thermometer now! (Thanks Golden Gate Science Dept for sharing!) 

We will begin adding the daily classroom temperature to our observations this coming week.

Hope you're having a great weekend!

À demain!

Saturday Tomatosphere - you can see a few tiny stems starting to grow!

Sunday Tomatosphere - Group D - The tiny stems are getting longer!

Sunday Tomatosphere - Group F - More stems here, too! Look closely!

What a great evening of learning!

It was so great to see so many families at our student-led conferences this evening.
What a wonderful celebration of all the learning students do at school each and every day!

Have a great evening!

See you this evening!

Looking forward to a celebration of our learning at our student-led conferences
and Scholastic Book Fair this evening!

Open House format from 4:30 - 8:00 pm.

See you soon!

What's Up, Wednesday?

Hi there Knight families!

I have been getting quite a few emails about Soup and Conferences, so I thought I'd clarify a few things...

1) Student-led conferences are tomorrow (Thursday) evening at the school. It runs from 4:30pm - 8:00pm and is an open-house format (no registration on Conference Manager required). Show up at a time convenient for you and stay for as long as you'd like! You'll have a chance to visit all of your child's classrooms and see what they have been learning! They are the ones who will guide you through the evening by explaining and showing you their work and by teaching you the different learning activities they have done in class. We can't wait to see you all there!

2) Scholastic Book Fair! The book fair will be set up in the school library tomorrow evening (during conferences) and will have books of all sorts, in both English and French, for purchase. AND... one lucky student from our class will receive a Golden Ticket in class tomorrow, good for a $10 purchase at tomorrow evening's book fair! Wow!

3) Soup and canned goods for our SOUPer Bowl! There are only 2 days left to bring in items for our SOUPer Bowl challenge! Our room already has a good collection started, but when it comes to donating to Winnipeg Harvest, MORE is always better! Please send in any canned food items by Friday, November 18. Bringing donations with you to conferences tomorrow evening is certainly welcome!

If you have any further questions, please do not hesitate to send me an email!
Have a great evening! :)

Tomatosphere Tuesday!

(While dated Wednesday, this post was originally written yesterday - Tuesday, November 15. For some reason (ah, technology!) the post did not publish yesterday afternoon as I had intended it to. My apologies!)

Our seeds are planted and our data collection has begun!

We planted 2 types of tomato seeds - "D" and "F" into peat pots and placed our peat pots into mini greenhouses. We each got to plant 2 seeds from each group of seeds, so 4 seeds in total!
We will make daily observations every day for the next 30 days. Our daily observations will include writing the date, the day of the experiment, the time of the observation, the temperature of the class and
how many seeds from each group have germinated.
It is expected that the seeds will start germinated between days 5 and 7,
meaning we should start seeing tiny stems and leaves as early as Monday!

As the experiment continues, we will discuss the need for collecting this type of data as it pertains to humans colonizing Mars. We will also be discussing the Scientific Method and learning how to: write detailed hypotheses, analyze and graph our collected data and represent our findings in well-written conclusions.

Check out some photos from our morning together!

Getting ready! The peat pot discs are soaking in water so they can expand into small pots perfect for tomato seed planting!

Here are the tomato seeds. Can you see any difference between the two seeds?

Cheese! We are planting our tomato seeds! This is SO fun!

All seeds are now planted and the pots have been placed into mini-greenhouse trays.
The trays will remain covered until the first seeds have started to germinate.

Welcome Back!

After shaking off the dust from our four-day weekend, we got right to work!

In Math, we learned a new factor game, using dice, graph paper and colourful highlighters! We took turns rolling a very special 2-in-1 die and multiplied the 2 digits showing. We then had to represent the product of the 2 digits on our graph paper in the form of a rectangle. We could either use the dimensions rolled, or we could draw a rectangle using different dimensions that would still give us the same product. 

(Ex: Mme Careen rolled a 5 and a 6. 5 x 6 = 30. Mme Careen can either draw a rectangle with the dimensions 5 x 6, or she could choose to draw a 1 x 30, 2 x 15 or 3 x 10 rectangle instead. 

All of these options work because the product is still 30).

At the end of class, we each added up the total amount of area covered by our rectangles to see who won!

We can't wait to challenge you to this game Thursday evening during Student-Led Conferences!

In Français, we reviewed the expectations of how to effectively read with a partner before beginning our daily LaLaLa. For 10 minutes we should be reading the same book as our partner, continuously. Stopping to ask about an unknown word or to check pronunciation it ok (and encouraged)! Speaking in English about our lunches or our pet hamster or interrupting other reading groups is NOT ok. Reading with a partner went much better today than it has in the past and we will continue to work on reading with a partner this week.

Science: First of all, congratulations to Owen and Shaan who presented their projects today. All projects will be available for you to see Thursday evening. They can also be taken home at that time as well. 

Secondly...

Tomatoes! We will be planting our tomato seeds tomorrow, which will mark the beginning of our Tomatosphere investigation! More information about this experiment will be shared on the blog in the coming days, but if you'd like an overview, click HERE to watch a video explaining the program.

Miscellaneous items:

1) Agendas, agendas! Over half the class was without an agenda today! We write in our agendas daily so students MUST have them in class. Please remind your child to use their agenda - and don't be afraid to check to see WHAT they are writing in it. Due dates, reminders, things we've done in class, new words we've learned. It's ALL in there!

2) SOUPer Bowl! Deadline to donate non-perishable canned items has been moved to Friday of this week. The homeroom with the highest number of cans donated wins a pizza party!!

Please donate as you are able. (All donations will be sent to Winnipeg Harvest next week).

3) Scholastic order forms were handed out in class today! All orders earn our class "book money" to be spent on books for our classroom libraries! Books (both in English and French) make wonderful gifts! 

Deadline for orders is Monday, November 28th. 

It's going to be great week of learning! :)