Walkathon

Hard to believe it is already that time of year! This Friday is our Walkathon, and we are hoping for good weather, along with another successful fundraiser.  Tonight is the last chance to gather pledges - we will be collecting forms on tomorrow morning. 

Unfortunately, there were no times left for our class to visit the Fort Langley National Historic site this June. On a positive note, we thoroughly enjoyed the explorer Prezi's. Students did a fantastic job! Many of them learned to do so much more with Prezi's than I taught them; we even had one student teaching a parent how to use it. We are now looking at the Fur Trade. Students will be working in table groups to create a museum artifact display that demonstrates their understanding. We will also have one final opportunity to use role play in Social Studies. 

This term we have used role plays several times in both Science and Social Studies. Our last project was to create a talk show that demonstrated the life cycle of an organism. It is so amazing to see the growth over the year and the natural talents of students emerge with these types of activities. 

This week students began a mini-research project in Science on an organism of their choosing. They may need to locate additional facts on the Internet at home as some students chose very unique organisms. Students should not be just printing out pages of information off the Internet. I have taught them to use proper note-taking format. In addition, we add the words "for kids" to our search terms to ensure that we find kid-friendly websites. Many students have already begun work on the final product which is an organism trading card. 

We have begun a new read aloud this week: Number the Stars by Lois Lowry. It follows a ten-year old girl and her family as they set out to save her best friend, Ellen, and her parents, who are Jewish, during World War II. We will be  spending much of our reading instruction on higher level comprehension strategies such inferring. 

In word work, we have been reviewing our Nifty Thrifty Fifty. This week we are focusing on prefixes and their meanings. Next we will review suffixes. 

I have been working hard with the class to ensure that they are ready for grade five.  One thing that we are practicing is working in a focused manner during work periods. I have also been finishing up with year end assessments and using the information gathered from these to plan the focus for Language Arts for the final month. 

Please check the calendar frequently as the following month is full of activities.