Author: Tiffany Poirier

Hello, parents/guardians!

*Please let me know if you are a grade 4 parent/guardian who call join our June 21st beach day as a supervisor. We would love to have you with us!

Today in math we reviewed our learning in preparation for our data and graphing assessment tomorrow. As well, we practiced some more calculations with money.

We also enjoyed a read aloud of “The Peace Tree from Hiroshima” and followed up our Social Studies learning around the history of human rights violations in Canada, such as Japanese interment camps.

Combining learning goals in Physical Heath Education and Career Education, we explored more about making healthy choices and identifying and standing up to harmful forms of peer pressure. Students considered stories and brainstormed what to do when faced with various forms of peer pressure.

Our reading strategies lesson in the afternoon focussed on how to improve comprehension of higher level texts, using retellings of the history and invention of cheese and another text about the invention of ice cream. We reviewed the importance of identifying new vocabulary words and trying to understand their meanings from context clues and from using a dictionary. We practiced reading aloud with expression and fluency, placing emphasis on specific words to enhance meaning. Two new words for us today were “patent” and “rennet”.

As well, we continued with the research and art making required for our Time Traveller’s Trading Cards project. The cards are coming along so nicely and look amazing!

Happy Wednesday, Division 2 families!

Check out these fantastic portals to different places, times and dimensions…

Hearing students explain their creative choices and where they would like to travel had been wonderful.

As well, here is a peak at the math we have been exploring. This morning I told the students that they would “find a few hundred dollars on each desk”. I invited them to get to know the features of the currency, add it up, and create a multi-question “math story” about the money. The students were so excited to make deals and buy and sell things. It was fun to see their joy in the play of striking it rich. Hahah!

Hello, Division 2!

Our class enjoyed an extra special presentation and art lesson on the afternoon of Friday, May 13th. Carol McDougall, the award-winning author-illustrator of A Salmon’s Sky View, kindly joined our class to share a preview of her beautiful forthcoming book, Jellies in the Belly: A Sea Turtle’s Atlantic Adventure!

Carol read her wonderful story and shared her beautiful watercolour paintings with students, and then revealed her painting secrets! Students were then supported in creating their own underwater scenes featuring sea turtles and jellyfish.

This rich lesson was a meaningful way to celebrate and extend research we began on sea turtles—and it was truly inspiring to learn about Carol’s creative process. Thank you so much for generosity, Carol! Your teaching

Hello, division 2 families!

It’s been a whirlwind of sunshine-infused learning and adventure lately! See below for a little glimpse into our fun. We have now wrapped up our Fractions and Decimals units, and are working through our units on Perimeter and Area as well as Money and Financial Literacy.

Happy long weekend, division 2! Here are some recent highlights from our classroom. We have put up a new bulletin board of “Collaborative Sci-Fi Story Writing”.

This display showcases the results of a creative writing exercise where students wrote a compelling first line of a story with a time traveling theme or science fiction elements. Then they passed the story on to another student to write the second line, and so on. After about 10 lines added by different people, the students received the stories they started so they could wrote a conclusion and title for them. Students had the board creative license to make changes as they saw fit. The results were amazing! See below.

We have been asking great questions and learning new vocabulary and related science concepts (tesseract, hypercube, spacetime, dimension, black hole, wormhole, spaghettification, grandfather paradox, cosmology, speed of light, etc.). We have also watched some videos by physicists, including Carl Sagan, Brian Greene, and Neil DeGrass Tyson.

An inquiry question we’ve explored in our fiction writing unit is “What makes an excellent opening line?” I presented students with over 30 opening lines of famous novels widely acknowledged for having strong first lines. I asked students to analyze and discuss the merits of these exemplars and then to us them as inspirational frameworks for creating their own compelling opening lines.

After this practice, I invited students to submit as many entries as they would like to our own “GREAT FIRST LINE CONTEST”. The entries were wonderfully diverse and intriguing, as you can see below…

Each student cast votes for their top 5 favourite lines and the “People’s Choice” winners were tallied and announced as below…

In Art and ADST class, students have been designing fun model time machines and working to improve their drawing skills by practicing creating unique natural textures using just pencil, eraser and a smudger (Q-Tip.)

In math, we are continuing to explore our unit on fractions, decimals, and money. We had a formative assessment on Monday—it was great to see such excellent growth in understanding in just 2 weeks! Thank you to students who continue to take home their math duotang regularly for review at home. I hope those flash cards I sent home with you have been not only helpful, but also maybe even a bit fun! We have been doing lots of whole class and small group review, and emphasizing strategies for solving word problems. Remember to slow down to really READ what each question is asking, UNDERLINE key words/numbers, make note of what UNIT is being used, and WRITE YOUR ANSWER AS A COMPLETE SENTENCE including any units of measurement or dollar signs needed, etc.

COMING SOON: We will be creating our own graphic novels!

Hello, division 2 families!

We are back from Spring Break and having fun in our new cross-curricular unit on the theme of TIME TRAVEL! There are so many fun surprises in store. More will be revealed on the blog in the coming weeks.

Did you know that Stephen Hawking once hosted a party for Time Travellers? Here is a video we watched about that: https://youtu.be/elah3i_WiFI Our class will be hosting our own TIME TRAVELLERS TEA PARTY at the end of term. The fun costumes we make will be wondrous and the conversations we share about our travels in space-time will be riveting.

In the meantime, I invite you to enjoy these sensational self-portraits and “I Am” poems that employ powerful figurative language…

Happy weekend, division 2 families! I hope you are enjoying the sunshine! Here are a few highlights from last week…

On Friday, students were invited to explore a selection of quotations about learning. Each student chose one quote that spoke to him or her and then found a quiet space in the class to think about the meaning of the quote and identify personal connections to it.

Then, after instruction and modelling of some reading and oratory skills, students rehearsed their quotes aloud 10-15 times, working on their fluency, expression, and phrasing. They experimented with reading their quotes in monotone voices, without attending to punctuation. They also practiced being overly dramatic and speaking with exaggerated singsong voices. Then they practiced saying the quotes for one another in partners and small groups using conversational voices that felt energized yet natural. Eventually we created the above video to capture our learning and to share with families.

What else happened last week? We had fun getting deeper into our unit on fractions, decimals, and percent. We seem to frequently make lots of connections between fractions and food—the students most enjoy thinking of how fractions can be used to make equitable distributions of things like candy, cake, and pizza! Ha! Students also took home their “Fractions Fortune Teller” games to practice with families.

As well, since this past week was the week before I submitted report cards to the office for processing, there was a fair bit of catch up work for students: presenting book talks, doing math quiz rewrites, math meetings, fixing up portfolios, and working on puppets and puppet shows. The puppet shows have been hilarious—such a creative, fun part of the day!

“Fun fact”: I have now submitted the report cards for our class for term 2 to the office. It took me about 26-hours to write them, spread out over the last two weeks of evenings and weekends—so my family will sure be happy to have me back and present in their lives! I write longer report cards because I believe it’s important to not only “report” on students, but to try to capture a snapshot of their wonderful qualities and contributions as a time capsule for them and to shed light on the details of the kind of learning division the students are experiencing. I hope these reports and blog help families to feel connected and to have richer after school conversations at home.

Thank you for you checking in on this blog and for watching the dialogue videos this term—I hope you have enjoyed hearing the sweetness of these creative, critical thinkers in our class as they work through big ideas in discussion. This is a time in the world when it helps to focus on the moments of learning, optimism, and joy—it’s a privilege to see your children create these kind of moments everyday.

Hello, division 2 families! I have to brag to you about how amazing your kids are—and what they did that made my day…

As you know, we have been learning about the fur trade in Social Studies; and in Art/ADST we have been making puppets. Well, students have been bringing in lots of interesting fabric pieces, socks, buttons, ribbon, etc., and sharing these with each other. These supplies have become highly sought after resources!

So a few students made a fun connection after being inspired by Canadian fur trading posts. They set up their own “PUPPET SUPPLY TRADING POST” to help systematize fair distribution of their supplies.

What a brilliant cross-curricular connection! We are seeing meaningful bartering happen in class, and some students are offering their puppet-making and sewing services to others and posting their little “store front signs”. It’s fun to see! Someone noted that it’s nice and different that no animals were harmed in our “puppet fur trade” — puppet pelts are definitely vegan!

When students link their historical learning to their own lives and have fun in the process, it’s a teacher’s dream come true! (When I teach the fur trade to new students next year, I will definitely time it to line up with puppet making again!)

Also, today we enjoyed so more book talks by the students. All the talks have been really well done and are motivating students to want to read more!

We also did a re-write of the Division quiz today, and had an optional math enrichment quiz on the topics of exponents and order of operations (BEDMAS). Lots of great thinking happened in our class today!

Welcome back! Today we launched the week with our new unit on fractions. We started from the basics, identifying that a fraction is a part of a whole.

The bottom number (denominator) tells us how many parts the whole is divided into and the top number (numerator) says how many parts we have.

Homework: Students will be bringing home a “Fractions Placemat”. Students should explain to family members what they learned about fractions today. (Teaching others is great reinforcement of learning.)

We also began our sewing lessons today! We established our safety systems and guidelines, and then students watched me demo some skills. Then they began practicing what they learned. Everyone is doing a great job!

In the afternoon in Language Arts, we began work on our “Book Talks”. I played the following video that I made for students as an example of a Book Talk that would meet all of the criteria. We reviewed and discussed the Book Talk template and the Assessment sheet in depth with examples, so students can feel clear on the expectations. Then students had a work period to begin planning their talk; I circulated the room to answer questions and support students one-to-one in planning. *If you have time this week, please invite your child to practice presenting his/her book talk to you.