I can hardly believe that we have already completed our first month of school! Independent reading and conferences are in full swing with some kids already working on their first novel responses. I'm loving the initiative that the kiddos are taking to sign up for conferences to talk about their books and set goals for themselves. We have been doing quickwrites to work on the rewriting and drafting stages of the writing process and next week we will dive into our first major writing assessment, the personal narrative. We read an article and discussed the war in Ukraine and students responded to the article using Nearpod a digital tool that we will be using throughout the year. I really love this tool because it allows me to record my instructions so that students who happen to be away can still do work while they are at home. We finished off the week learning about residential schools and watching part of Gord Downey's The Secret Path the Chanie Wenjack story as part of Media Literacy. We had powerful discussions and the students started to work on creating their own media texts in response to the Songs The Stranger and The Swing Set.
We took time this we to reflect on organization skills and learned how to use the To-Do List in Google Classroom to make sure that we are keeping up with our school work and submitting assignments when they are due. We will be reflecting on our learning skills every week as I truly believe that when students learn how to learn they will be set up for success.
In Science, we worked on creating our first sketchnote in response to a National Geographic video and started to begin investigating ideas for an independent research assignment that will have the kids look into problems related to clean drinking water.
In History, we learned about how to search the Internet efficiently and also how to evaluate information that we find online as part of the learning about the Inquiry Process. We also finished watching episode 4 of the CBC series Canada The Story of Us and will be responding to the video next week.
