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! :)

Lest We Forget

We gathered as a school community this morning to remember those who gave their lives for us.
Our service was a sincere celebration of music, student work and quiet, emotional reflection.

We are all truly blessed to live in a country such as Canada
and are thankful for the sacrifices our soldiers make for us each and every day.

Je me souviens.

Mardi!

We were very lucky to have Mme Page in our classroom again this morning.
She brought some fun Math activities for us to play.
Some of them were so tricky but we worked hard together in our groups to figure them out!

We continued working on our "La paix" poems in Français. Many of us have finished our rough drafts are are working on editing with a partner and Mme Careen before starting our good copy. Our poems will be posted on one of the bulletin boards in our classroom when we are finished. We can't wait to share them with you next Thursday evening at our student-led conferences.

In Science, we continued listening to project presentations. Congratulations to Kacey, Claire, Wyatt and Gavin C who presented their extra-terrestrials today! We'll finish up with the remaining presentations tomorrow and will be ready to move on to our exciting Tomatosphere project next week! Stay tuned here for more details!

November Picture!

We started our day with more Science presentations! Congratulations to: Nina, Elsie, Sofia, Josh, Lucas, Ebony, Courtney and Pablo who shared their creative extra-terrestrial creations with us.

In Français, we listened to Mme Careen read us the story, "La première lettre du petit Prince Paul."

We were all surprised by the ending of the book! An excellent book to show us what can happen when we assume and share information with others that we don't know to be true. 

We then continued working on our 5-senses peace poems and will continue to add descriptive language to our texts so that they paint a clearer picture of what peace feels like to us.

And, before ending our morning together, we posed for our November class picture!

Cheese! :)

Have a great afternoon, everyone!

It's Friday!

What a great day we had today!

In Math, we continue to work on factors and finding the greatest common factor. We were very lucky to have Mme Page with us again this morning. She showed us two cool Math logic games that got our brains thinking!
We started by playing Mastermind. We figured out a secret 3-digit number by guessing different numbers and getting clues with each guess. After Mme Page played one round with us, Claire had the chance to be the teacher!

We were also presented with the logic puzzle shown below. By placing the digits 1-9 in the circles,
(using each digit only once) the sum of the three digits for each triangle needs to equal 13. Not so easy!

Before leaving, Mme Page gave us 2 hints: the digits 3 and 9 can each be placed with the first triangle (on the left). Good luck figuring out the solution! :)

In Français, in keeping with our peace theme, we read the story "Regarde par-ci!" After reading the story, we all closed our eyes for a couple of minutes to picture what peace feels like for us. What does it look like, smell like, taste like, feel like, sound like? We wrote our thoughts and memories down and will be using these ideas to write a short, free verse poem about peace feels like for us.

In Science, we started presenting our "extra-terrestres" design projects which were due in class today. Congratulations to Jessica, Aurora, Bronwyn and Graeme who presented today!
We will continue sharing our projects with one another on Monday.

Have a great weekend, everyone!

What We're Working On...

Happy Wednesday everyone!

Today in class we continued working with factors and were introduced to the PGFC - Plus Grand Facteur Commun (Greatest Common Factor). In comparing the factor sets of different numbers, we noticed that 1 is a factor that ALL numbers have in common and sometimes, 1 ends up being the greatest common factor of a set of numbers!
Click HERE to watch a short, silly video about finding the greatest common factor.
We'll also watch this short video in class tomorrow.

In Français, we've started exploring a short theme about peace.
Today, we listened to Mme Careen read us the story, "Qu'est-ce que la paix?" by Wallace Edwards.

We spent time looking at the beautiful pictures and discussed why certain pictures were drawn the way the were. We each had our own favourite for different reasons.

We will read a different peace-themed book every day for the next week and will use the ideas and themes to create our own piece of writing.

What does peace mean to you?