Fall is in the Air

      The mornings are crisper, the fall colours are everywhere and we are trucking along in E104.  In English, many students are finishing up their first novels and have begun to work on their first independent novel responses.  We read Roch Carrier's story "The Hockey Sweater" in preparation for students to write their own memoirs. We went over all stages of the assignment which can be found under the Writers Workshop section of Google Classroom. We picked a due date of October 18th for students to have their best copies turned in. Students also finished up their responses to Gord Downie's The Secret Path and the pieces that they created are haunting.  They also honed their sketchnoting skills by responding to an article of their choice from the website Wonderopolis.

   

In Science, we talked about water from an indigenous perspective and learned about Josephine Mandanim and her niece, clean water activist Autumn Peltier. We learned about the states of water and reviewed the water cycle. 

    In History, students responded to episode 4 of CBC's Canada: The Story of Us. They were asked to give their opinion about which of the 5 stories we watched had the most significant impact on connecting British North America. This question is modelled on the opinion questions that appear in the OSSLT Literacy Test they will have to write in grade 10. Historically this question has caused problems for students in AMDSB so I want to give my kiddos as much experience with this type of question as I can while I have them.

Success Criteria

☑️ Your answer contains part of the question

☑️Your answer contains details from the video

☑️Your answer contains evidence of your own thinking

☑️Your answer is in complete sentences

In Visual Arts, we learned about Norval Morrisseau, the Picasso of the North. Students have begun to create their own pieces of Woodland-style art.  I can't wait to see what they create! We are going to use Flipgrid for art reflections this time. This is a digital tool that allows students to leave video responses instead of writing out their ideas.  Stay tuned for their works of art in future posts.

Reminders for the Future:

Uncle Dad's Pizza Fundraiser Orders

Monday, October 24th is a PD day no school for students

Friday, November 4th is picture re-take day

The Power of Prewriting

Reading

This week we reflected on our reading responses from I am Not a Number and The Secret Path.  After

taking up their work the kids self-assessed their responses against the success criteria and made note of
what they could do to improve the next time they are asked to write a response to another text. The kids
also continued to work on their independent novel studies and shared a few more novel related Minecraft
creations.

Oral Communication

This week we talked about what active listening looks and sounds like during class discussions and
students put this into play while we took up our work form Orange Shirt Day. Students were encouraged
to build off of each other's ideas as they shared their thoughts and feelings about both stories. We had
some more really great thought-provoking discussions.

Our plan for memoir writing. First draft to be finished for Tuesday, October 15.

Writing 

This was a big week for writing. We started by watching the classic NFB film, The Sweater which is an
animated memoir written by Roch Carrier. We then reviewed the writing process before we began the
work on our own short memoirs. We co-created the success criteria for this assignment and then got

down to work. We started the prewriting stage by having conversations about possible memories to
share and then reviewed the work that we had done with our quickwrites for inspiration. I really stressed
the importance of spending lots of time planning before writing and shared that students who brainstorm
and plan before writing responses on the OSSLT tend to do better.  We took advantage of the beautiful
fall weather and moved our classroom to the courtyard to get our creative juices following. Students
worked on their first drafts which are to be finished for Tuesday so that we can move into the revision

stage of writing.

Idea generation through talking.

Courtyard writing with 78

Courtyard writing with 8D