Talent Show!

Tomorrow - Thursday, June 1 - we will be celebrating some very talented Knights!
Our singers, musicians, thespians and Rubik's cube masters will be putting on a show like none other, and all for a great cause. Our social justice team has decided that they would like raise funds for 
The Children's Hospital Foundation and here's how you can be a part of it all.
At the end of the show, students will have a chance to donate to The Children's Hospital Foundation by putting their coins or cash in their favourite act's donation station. 
The act that raises the most funds will be named the WINNER of Ness' Got Talent.
The show will begin around 1:00 pm in the school gymnasium.
Families and friends of Ness students are welcome to attend!
Hope to see you there! :)

A A i M

Happy Friday, everyone!
We had a great morning of activities, information and fun!

Here are some of the activities we took part in:

COMPOSITES:  Students learned about the evolution of composites and how they are used to build aircrafts. Students also made a small composite panel.

ROCKETRY: Students learned about rocketry by experimenting and launching straw rockets.

SPACE: “Crater Fun” participants became scientist-detectives by participating in asteroid impacts simulation and reporting on their characteristics. 

HERC THEATRE: Students learned about and observed various careers in aerospace and aviation, both in the air and behind the scenes! 

FLIGHT: This station taught us all about the Bernoulli Principal, along with many other scientific principles through a mini-lesson and through experimenting with different designs of paper airplanes.

 Have a great weekend!

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We're pretty much famous! (A Writer's Workshop Update)

Ok. First things first. And, it's kind of a big deal.
In the teaching world, there are certain educators - subject-specific experts - that many teachers look up to.
They have earned "rock star teacher status" in their own right. Regie Routman, while many of you outside of the educator world may not be familiar with her name, is certainly considered one of those people. Our staff (and many schools within out school division) have been studying, learning and applying Regie's "Reading Writing Connection" for years. And, Ms. Regie just happens to be best friends with Ms. Sandy - the very Ms. Sandy that was in our classroom but a few weeks ago!
So, why does that matter?

At the end of our Writer's Workshop, the wonderfully kind Ms. Banks (who was one of the admin/teacher observers in our class during our week with Ms. Sandy) tweeted Regie with a link to our classroom blog to share all that we had accomplished during the week. And... Regie retweeted it! A rock star status educator shared a link to our wonderful work with her 10.4K followers! How AMAZING! And, as a result of that, our classroom blog stats went through the roof! Our five Writer's Workshop related blog posts have almost 400 unique page views (compared to a typical post that would get 15 or so). This is a true testament to how hard we all worked during our week with
Ms. Sandy and how inspiring our time together was for everyone involved.

Now, putting all of Mme Careen's starstruck-ness aside for a minute, here is what we've been up to with our 

math writing since Ms. Sandy's visit.

We've reviewed and finished our drafts and have had the chance to work with Ms. Toth once again to review our Math thinking. Both Ms. Toth and Mme Careen have been reviewing our Math to ensure that each step of our thinking includes both the algebraic equation as well as any other Math used to arrive at the solution.

Mme Careen then typed up our drafts and we worked in teams to review and edit our writing. Once we finished making changes on our printed copies, we headed to the computer lab to make all necessary changes directly in our team's Word file. We also collaborated on what vocabulary words should be in our manual's glossary and identified them in our own Math Mobile writing by making them red and bolding the font.

What's next? 

Once all groups have finished making their final edits our Math Mobile problems will be printed and we will write in the math that goes with each step. We will then work as a class to negotiate the order in which all the problems will be presented, so that a table of contents can be typed up. 

From there, all pages will be scanned to create one digital file that can be published, printed and shared!

So, we're getting close!

Our weeks of hard work are about to come together in the form of an amazing final product!

Be sure to stay tuned... exciting book launch news to be announced soon! :)

Les monstres!

We've finished our monsters!

Using all of these wonderful monster-themed books as our monster-creation inspiration, 

we created some pretty fabulous looking creatures.

We worked hard describing how to draw our monsters step by step. We also included specific details about each of our monster's features so that other students would be able to re-create our monsters as closely as possible.

Most of the monster recreations were pretty similar, meaning we met our learning goal of 

writing a specific set of instructions to create a monster-ific final product! 

Bravo!

Reader's Theatre

It's time for Reader's Theatre!

We've chosen our roles and are now working on reading over our scripts and adding presentation details such as gestures, movement and props. 

We are also focusing reading our lines with proper pronunciation and speaking with expression and fluidity.

Our Reader's Theatre presentations will start Wednesday of next week.

We are looking forward to seeing what all of the other groups have been up to!

Ratios, Fractions, Equivalent Fractions and Percents!

Happy Wednesday!

This morning in Math we started learning about ratios (les rapports). Ratios are a comparison of quantities. We use ratios almost every day, especially in the kitchen! We see ratios when we mix frozen orange juice, cook rice and bake a cake! Specific ratios ensure of juice won't be watered down, our rice won't be too mushy and
our cake won't be dry!

And, because there's no better way to kick off a new Math concept than with a sugary cereal treat, we opened up a box of Froot Loops to practice our ratio writing skills!

We each got 20 Froot Loops and had to answer specific questions comparing one colour of "Loop" to another. Mme Careen tried to trick us by asking us to write a ratio of how many BLUE Froot Loops we had.
Silly Mme! There is no such thing as blue Froot Loops! :)

After we wrote out all of our ratios, we were challenged to find the percentage of each colour represented in our group of 20 Froot Loops. Because percents are fractions over 100 (and not over 20 like the fractions we had written), we had a bit of Math thinking to do!

Ex: Mme Careen had 4 yellow Froot Loops. What percentage of Froot Loops are yellow?

The ratio of yellow Froot Loops to ALL of the Froot Loops is 4 : 20. 

In order to find the percentage of yellow Froot Loops, we need to find an equivalent ratio (fraction) over 100. 

4 : 20  =  20 : 100. 

(We found the equivalent ratio by multiplying by 5). 

This means that 20% of the Froot Loops are yellow!

In addition to learning about ratios, this activity was also getting us ready to review and tackle fractions and equivalent fractions next week! Who knew there was so much Math hiding in a box of Froot Loops?!

Have a great afternoon! :)

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P.S. Feeling a little bit lost and/or unsure about all of this fraction/equivalent fraction/percents stuff?
These two videos can help!

Math Antics Percent Video
(We've seen this video before, but it's a great review!)

Math Antics Percent and Equivalent Fractions
(We'll be watching this video in class early next week, but watching it ahead of time certainly won't hurt!)