Mr. Wideman (Room 104) - Nov 4 - Nov 8

We hope that everyone is having a restful and reflective Remembrance Day long weekend. Our students put together a thoughtful and respectful Remembrance Day assembly on Friday morning, led by the music and organization of Mrs. Lacey. Thank you to our school community for attending and supporting this event. The students also had the opportunity to hear about the experiences of Corporal Mark Fuchko, who served in Afghanistan and lost both legs during an IED attack while on a tour of duty. For our school community, this was an important event that brought us together to share our respects for the men and women who have served, and continue to serve, in the Canadian Armed Forces. We thank them for their bravery and their sacrifices.

Our work in Language Arts has been focussed around original story writing, and students are preparing their plans to write their own creative story. Based on the structure and framework as outlined by the Pixar films, the students are working through a story planning template (available through Google Drive) that will help them to organize and revise their thoughts and ideas before beginning the formal story writing process. At this stage, the students are working to complete their details on characters and setting, as well as establishing the basic outline of events that will guide their writing. Stay tuned as this work continues to progress during the week.

In Math, we have been spending time with a focus on equations and working with basic facts using the four operations. At this stage, the students have expressed that division has been a particular area of challenge, and we have been working with inverse operations to demonstrate the relationship between multiplication and division. All students have been registered with an account for our new problem solving website, Lure of the Labyrinth. We started working on the initial activities in Lure of the Labyrinth, beginning with equations involving variables. While working in the Labyrinth, students may choose to either play the quest game or work on individual puzzles that focus on the different strands of our math curriculum. Students are welcome to continue working on Lure of the Labyrinth at home as well.

This week, Social Studies and Science were focussed on wrapping up some projects on Waste and the production of Electricity, and we'll be completing some further investigations this week. Our work in map explorations has taken us into Scratch where we are currently working to design and program an interactive map of Canada. This work will progress with the students creating quizzes that will demonstrate their knowledge and understanding of Alberta, Canada, and the different regions of both. These quizzes will be shared online in our Room 104 Scratch Studio, and this will provide all Room 104 students with the opportunity to review and provide feedback on the projects of their classmates.

We're looking forward to another great week of learning! Please feel free to contact me if you have questions about any of the learning in our classroom community. Thank you for your support, and enjoy the upcoming week.

-Mr. Wideman