Hello, division 4 families.
This week in a Social Studies, Language Arts, and Art, we have been learning about the history and meaning behind “Orange Shirt Day” through stories, videos, and dialogue. We are exploring the question: What does reconciliation mean to you?
The students created individual orange shirt artworks and contributed to a collaborative artwork. Below you can see information and links to the videos we watched in class…
What is Orange Shirt Day? “Since 2013, September 30th has been known by many as Orange Shirt Day. This is an event that grew from Phyllis Webstad, from the Stswecem’c Xgat’tem First Nation, sharing her story of having her new school clothes – including a very special shiny orange shirt – taken from her at the age of six when she arrived at St. Joseph Mission residential school. Her story created an opportunity for discussion of the residential school legacy. The combination of Orange Shirt Day with the new National Day for Truth and Reconciliation allows Canadians to show their acknowledgement of the legacy of the residential school program by wearing orange shirts and purposely engaging in the Calls to Action identified in the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada.”
In Language Arts, we have been analyzing sentences and sentence fragments, and we played a “thumbs up, thumbs down” game to reinforce and show our learning. We also had fun with the challenge to transform boring sentence fragments in creative sentences. We reviewed that sentences should are made up of a subject and predicate and that they always begin with a capital letter and end in a punctuation mark (period, question mark, or exclamation point). I announced the expectation that students should try to always write in complete sentences with appropriate capitalization and end punctuation—except when taking creative license in writing poetry. We will work on this goal all year.
In math, this week I introduced the idea of creating and sharing “Math Stories” using fun toys and math manipulatives. Math stories can be simple word problems brought to life with props, but with creativity they can evolve in complexity and have more interesting narratives with classic story features. Math stories are a fun way for us to deepen and enrich our math learning, develop our math vocabulary and oral language skills, and make more real world math connections. There will be more information on this to come.
As well today was our first day of meeting our Buddy Class. Each student was paired with a kindergarten student to mentor. Today the big buddies read aloud in the school’s courtyard garden from books that their little buddies chose, and then they played games. They all did a great job building new connections. It was heart-warming to see how happy the little buddies were to be treated with such kindness by the leaders in division 4. The purpose of having a buddy class is to offer a valuable act of service to younger students while providing new opportunities to practice leadership skills and collaboratively engage with curriculum in fresh ways. As we explore different activities with our buddy class, we will cover many curricular goals, especially in the areas of Language Arts, Science, Career Education, Art, and ADST.
Below are some questions and discussion topics you might want to explore…
- Tell me about your experience meeting your little buddy.
- What is the meaning of “Orange Shirt Day”?
- What is the difference between a sentence and a sentence fragment? Which of the following are sentences?
- Let’s go to the store.
- The big angry, hairy bear.
- On the top of the refrigerator
- Cheese tastes delicious!
- Do you like going to the beach?
- I exist.
Inquiry Ninja 