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.