Agenda Alert!

We were so busy learning this morning, we forgot to write in our agenda! Oops!
Here's what you should know:

Mathé: Our in-class assessment of positive and negative integers was due at the end of class this morning. We will receive a short amount of time in class tomorrow, but are encouraged to come in over the noon hour tomorrow to finish up if needed.

Science: Expérience #1 is due tomorrow. This includes a completed graph, completing questions 2 and 4a and writing a conclusion. We have had 2 periods to work on this assignment, so it should not take us long to finish-up tonight if need be.

Français: The good copy of our goals and the PicCollage inspiration board is due Friday. We have been working on our writing in class for the past three weeks and many students have already finished and submitted their work. Mme Careen's room will be open over the noon hour tomorrow if students would like to edit their rough drafts or use the iPads to complete the visual component of their assignment.

As always, if there are any questions, please do not hesitate to get in touch!

Have a great afternoon! :)

This week...

Happy Monday, everyone!
We started off our week with a busy morning and will keep up the pace until Spring Break!

Here's a look at what we were up to and what will be keeping us busy the next few days.

Ami-sprits:

It's always nice to kick off the week chatting with our ami-sprit! Mme gives us a specific question and we meet up with our buddy to check in. It's always fun to hear what our ami-sprit has to say! :)

Science:

We just finished Experience #1 and are working on graphing our results and writing a conclusion.
Expérience #1 will be due in class Wednesday of this week.

We will soon be starting our Design Process project for this term.
Stay tuned for more details coming later this week! (Hint: 🍅)!

Mathé:

We started an in-class assessment about positive and negative integers today. It's a bit different than your "traditional" assessment... we are drawing a picture and answering questions about it! Our assessments will be completed and collected at the end of Math class tomorrow. After Mme has corrected them, our artwork will be displayed on one of our bulletin boards in time for parent conferences next week!

We also continue to work on different mental math strategies and will be assessed on our most recent strategy (soustraction de la gauche) tomorrow.

Français:

We are almost done writing our goals for the remainder of the school year. After we have written our rough drafts, we are correcting them with Mme Careen and then getting started on making our inspiration boards using
Pic Collage. This assignment (writing and collage) are due Friday of this week.

We also continue to work on our reading, using "les 4 fantastiques" as a way to predict, question, clarify and summarize what we have read. We have been working through these steps as a class and will soon begin working with our reading groups to complete these 4 steps reading a variety of texts.

Wishing you all a great week! :)

Ninja Bed Bugs?!

We are very happy to welcome back Mme Page - one of our school division's numeracy support teachers - 

to our classroom! She always brings the coolest Math activities with her!

Here we are, learning how to play "Smothering Ninja Bed Bugs" - an activity that allows us to practice our multiplication and addition skills. To play the game we need to "smother" all of the bed bugs into squares or rectangles, adding the area of the squares or rectangles as we go. Once they are smothered, we count the total number of squares/rectangles we drew and square that number (multiply the number by itself) before adding it to our total. The goal is to get the LOWEST score possible, so there is certainly a little bit of strategy involved!

We will continue to play this game in class over the coming weeks and students will have the opportunity to post their totals and challenge one another to see who can get the lowest score for each game card!

Félicitations!

Congratulations to Aurora, Ebony and Jessica who presented their Concours d'art oratoire speeches
to the Grade 6s this morning!
The girls presented their well-written speeches with great volume, expression and confidence.
Well done! Bravo, les filles! :)

Hé Ho!

We had a great day at Festival today!

We started our day at Fort Gibraltar. We visited the Trading Post and the Blacksmith. 

We also had a chance to warm up by the fire while learning about the life of a voyageur.

We then headed off to the Gros Show!

This year's music group - Alfa Rococo - was from Québec. 

We had fun dancing and forming a conga line that wound its way through the tent!

There's always time for a group pic or two! 

The top photo is with the only remaining snow sculpture at Voyageur Park! 

The one below is with the Festival mascot!

Here is the mosaic picture of Tommy Prince. 

If you look closely, zoomed in on the right, is the class photo we submitted! Yay!

We then headed off to our last activity, "C'est l'aviron!"

After a short presentation about the voyageurs and their long voyages in their canoes, 

we had the chance to make our own craft; a canoe pin!

We cut out small canoes from red felt and then sewed the ends together and added beads.

Once finished, we safety-pinned our canoes to our shirts or jackets!

It was certainly a warm and muddy Festival, but we had lots of fun despite the lack of snow sculptures 

and freezing-cold fingers and toes!

Have a great evening! Hé Ho!

A visit from Mrs. Waters!

We were very lucky to have Mrs. Waters, one of our school division's Indigenous Education Teachers, 

in our classroom for 3 periods this week.

Day 1

We started by taking time to get to know one another.

We passed around a rock and shared one thing about ourselves.

We then discussed what Indigenous means and learned all of the different Indigenous groups 

that live here in Manitoba.

Day 2

We started our class today by listening to Mrs. Waters read the story, "The Friendship" by Betty Lynxleg. 

Next, we learned about the process of how treaties were negotiated and signed.

We then worked in groups to write a list of what we felt would be important to ask for when signing a treaty. We included things like the promise of education, metal cooking supplies, land, seeds and health care. Mrs. Waters reminded us that even though we represented different tribes and would all have unique needs and requests depending on where we lived, all tribes had to agree to the same set of provisions as only one treaty would be signed. We would also not be reminded about things we may have forgotten to ask for.

Day 3

When we came together for our third visit, we started by reviewing what we discussed during our first two visits.
We then learned a little bit about Treaty 1.

Working in the same groups as before, we read through Treaty 1 to find the date it was signed, where it was signed, and what provisions were included in the Treaty.

We noticed that the Treaty was written in English using "lawyer language" (bigger, more complicated words). This would have made it very hard for all of the Chiefs to understand what they were actually signing since they did not speak English.

We noticed that there many things left out of the Treaty and that certain promises were not indexed to 'grow' with time. For example, back in 1871 each Indigenous woman, man and child was granted a gift of $3 and an annuity of the same amount. That amount - $3 - remains the same today.

We were very happy to have Mrs. Waters with us this week 

and look forward to having her back in our classroom again soon.

100 Day!

Today we celebrated the 100th day of school!

We completed an Amazing Race type of activity, answering 9 different 100-themed questions.

 Once we completed all 9 questions we got a 100 Day pencil as a prize! Fun!

We then completed the "Défi de 100 secondes" - the 100 Seconds Challenge.

We started by estimating how many times we could complete a specific task in 100 seconds and then set the timer to see how accurate we were with our predictions!

How many times can you print your name in 100 seconds? How many push-ups can you do?

Click HERE, HERE and HERE to watch us in action!

We had a great morning together!

🎉 Hooray for 100 Day! 🎉

Mid-week update!

Math

We have started learning new mental math strategies for subtraction questions. Our current strategy - for subtraction questions that do not require regrouping - has us subtracting from left to right, starting with the largest place value, where we would normally default to subtracting from right to left, starting with the 'ones'.

We continue to work with positive and negative integers (les nombres entiers) and have started to compare positive and negative integers as well as determine the distance between a set of integers using a number line. HERE is a video, all about positive and negative integers, that we watched in class earlier this week.

Science

We completed the first test of Expérience #1 in class today. We will repeat the experiment again tomorrow and compare the results with what we recorded today. If the results are similar, we will average the times and graph the results. If the times are quite different, we will repeat the experiment a third (and possibly fourth) time to gain an accurate set of data.

Français

We read the article "L'origine de la Saint-Valetin" in class today. After listening to Mme read the article aloud, we re-read the article in our table groups and identified new vocabulary words we found challenging. We then worked in our table groups to begin writing a summary (resumé) of the article using the "Résumer" sentence starters from our "4 fantastiques" cards. The goal of this summary is to share the important facts/information of what we read in order. Each group is writing their article summary on chart paper and will then share their writing with the class.

Valentine's Day!

We started our day by listening to two different stories about love and friendship.



" La grande fabrique de mots" is about a country where the citizens hardly speak.
A place where you have to buy words and eat them in order to pronounce them.
This story is about a young boy, Philéas who wants to open his heart to Cybelle.


"Mais je t'aime déjà" is a sillier story about two friends, a bear and a duck, that spend the day together. The bear and the duck each have very different ideas of how to show they value each other's friendship.

After reading together, we completed two Valentine's Day themed activities. The first was a french expressions sheet where we had to find the meanings of different expressions with the word 'coeur.'
The second was a Math 'algebra' sheet where we had to determine the value of different valentine's shapes to make a math equation hold true.



A special thank you to everyone who brought sweet treats and notes to share.
Have a LOVE-ly afternoon!
💚

Classroom story-time and Kindness Week!

In honour of Kindness Week and I Love to Read month, we've been having classroom story-time in addition to our daily Français LaLaLa reading time.

This week, we've read stories about kindness, a "superhero" and cookies!

In addition to having a fun kindness-themed Spirit Week, we also spread kindness all over the school by buying

Kit Kat for Kindness grams (we sold 314 grams!), adding leaves to our Random Acts of Kindness tree and finding surprise post-it note messages on our lockers Friday morning!

It sure was a great week!

Wishing you all a wonderful weekend! :)

"No act of kindness, no matter how small, is ever wasted." - Aesop.

Skills Manitoba and Festival!

Happy Thursday, everyone!
We had a great, busy morning together!

In Math, we've started talking about positive and negative integers (les nombres entiers) and have realized that here, in Winnipeg, we are VERY familiar with negative numbers due to our frigidly cold winters! Brrr!
We watched this short video this morning as part of our lesson.

After our Math lesson, we were very fortunate to have Emily from Skills Manitoba come into our room for a presentation.

Did you know that by 2020 we will need 11 000 construction workers in our province alone? Wow! We learned about many different careers available to us and that this year's Skills Canada competition will be held here in Winnipeg! For more information, please click HERE.

In Français today, we read a silly story, Super Toupie (in honour of it being "Team Kindness to the Rescue" day) and worked on planning and writing our goals for the remaining part of the school year.
Mme Careen also told us about our upcoming field trip to Festival du Voyageur! Hé Ho!
ALL students will be attending the field trip Tuesday, February 21. Information letters and permission forms were sent home today and are due back to the school as soon as possible, please! And, what could be better than a field trip to Festival? A FREE field trip to Festival! No money required! Woo Hoo! Many, many thanks to our incredible Parent Council and our admin team for working hard to make it happen! It's going to be a great day!

Have a great afternoon, everyone!

Expo-Sciences!

It's time for the annual Expo-Sciences! Information will be sent home via the division's email/callback system about the annual Science Fair can also be found by clicking HERE.
Participation in Science Fair is optional, and projects must be done in French.

Important dates:

Application Form Due: Tuesday, February 21, 2017
Projects Due: Monday, March 13, 2017

Please do not hesitate to contact me with any questions!

Hello everyone! 

It's been a busy few weeks in Room 208!

We submitted our results to Tomatosphere and found out that Group D represented the tomato seeds that were sent to space for 5 weeks and Group F was the Control group of seeds. The average germination rate (from all classrooms that participated across Canada) showed were:

 D seeds -  76.3% and F seeds - 78.9%.

Here is a picture of us with our certificates of participation in the Tomatosphere program!

We've been working a lot on our reading and writing in Français since we've come back from winter break. We've been fortunate to have Mme Marcoux working with us in our classroom, too.

We've been using "les 4 fantastiques" in class since the beginning of the year with information texts. Mme Marcoux came in to model "les 4 fantastiques" using the short, fictional story Brutus so we can now use these reading strategies when reading all different types of texts.

When completing each section of "les 4 fantastiques," we use a set of writing prompts (sentence starters) to help us vary our word choice. Trying to use a different sentence starter at the beginning of each sentence: increases of français vocabulary, gives our writing depth and helps us create a unique voice when writing to share information.

Hé Ho! Festival du Voyageur time will soon be here!

Festival du Voyageur will once again be putting together a Family Mosaic to recognize a remarkable Manitoban (such as they did last year with the mosaic of Louis Riel) and our class is going to be a part of it! The above photo was submitted to Festival and will be one of many, many pictures that will make up a large photo tribute of 

Tommy Prince.

You can learn more about Tommy Prince and the Family Mosaic tribute by clicking HERE.

The Great Kindness Challenge!

We are taking on the Great KindNESS Challenge this week!

To celebrate being kind, we're having super-fab, kindNESS-themed sprit days!

It's going to be a great week! :)