With another busy week completed, we’ve now participated in our Terry Fox Run (Wednesday) and our Family Group meetings (Friday) as we continue to build our sense of community and school spirit here at Ron Southern. The Terry Fox Run delivered fantastic weather and running conditions, and we were excited by the overall effort and enthusiasm of our students as they ran in support of family and friends who have been impacted by cancer. Terry would be proud! Our Family Group meetings will occur once per month (on Fridays) throughout the school year as students meet in K-6 cross grade groups to participate in activities that will help strengthen connections between grades and our overall sense of belonging. This is a great opportunity for all of our grades to get to know each other, while our Grade 4/5/6 students take on leadership roles.
In Room 104, we’ve been continuing our work on organized, descriptive story writing, and the Pixar short films have been the basis for our work. This past week, students continued to work on their first drafts of their “Burn-E” story, and these are now available through Google Docs. As part of the Feedback Friday focus that we have undertaken at Ron Southern School, I encourage our Room 104 parents to take some time at the end of each week to view our work in Google Docs. This will provide you with an opportunity to discuss the work with your child, while gaining a deeper understanding of the topics and skills that have been our focus on a weekly basis. Please note that the Burn-E writing is still a work in progress, and students will have an opportunity to continue on the assignment during the upcoming week.
During the week, we worked on establishing clear criteria for our writing, and we utilized a writing assessment checklist to determine where our writing demonstrates areas of strength and areas for further growth. By working with a partner and participating in peer assessment, we had an opportunity to provide and discuss feedback with a classmate on their work as well. Our writing assessment checklist looks as follows:
This checklist will provide the structure for our story writing throughout the school year. As you review your child’s ongoing story writing in Google Docs, please use the checklist as a guide to help develop our collective understanding of the expectations around our writing this year. A copy of the assessment checklist is also available within your child’s Google Drive.
Our work in Math continues to focus on computational strategies and their application to problem solving situations. This past week, we took on the Krispy Kreme Donut problem, as well as the Bridge Crossing challenge. (Links to these activities are also available through our Twitter account @ronsouthern45 – please note that you do not need to have your own Twitter account in order to view our Ron Southern School accounts). We have been continuing to work with active and accurate measuring skills involving mm, cm, and km, as well as converting between these units of measure. Our group work will continue to focus on estimating and measuring perimeter and area, and we will begin to undertake some project work this week in designing and measuring using these skills.
As always, if you have any questions about any of our classroom happenings, please feel free to contact me anytime at ajwideman@cbe.ab.ca (I always aim to respond to e-mails by the end of each day).
Thank you for your support of your child’s learning. Stay warm over the next few days!
-Mr. Wideman
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