Dear Families,

Black & Orange Day!

Boo!  Spooooookaaaaayyyyy!

I would like to wish everyone a safe and spooktacular Halloween!  The students and I had a wonderful day together J Everyone looked so amazing in their black and orange.  I wanted to say thank you to all the families who contributed treats for our celebration – your time, energy, and love that went into it means the world to us!  Thank you!!!

Thank you parents for the generous treats!  I appreciate it :)

Spirit Assembly & Cuts for Terry:

On Tuesday, we had our first Spirit Assembly as a whole school honouring spirit as well as celebrating the donations we raised for the Terry Fox Foundation.  I am delighted to share that our school raised close to $2,000.   For a small, rural community school like ours this is absolutely amazing – Gooooo Chargers!!!  Students who raised a specific amount had the opportunity to cut a teacher’s hair.  Thank you to Ms. Doka and Mrs. Weiderer for participating in cuts for cancer, your new haircuts look beautiful!!!  Also at this assembly, we introduced each House Colours’ new spirit banner which are made up of dots that each student made!  We made our marks on Dot Day!!!  Thank you Mrs. Bell for spending the time to laminate these for us – they’re definite keepers and will help continue to build school spirit!

Using our school Ipads to enhance the presentation - a close up view for all to see!

Mrs. W all chopped and ready to donate - thank you!!!

Get ready Ms. Doka, here come the students with scissors :)

Stylists in the making - We did it!

Making a difference - building hope for our future!  We're lucky to have these two outstanding teachers!

RED House!  Makes their mark!

GREEN House - dot-err-if-ic!

BLUE House - way to go!!

YELLOW House - y-e-l-l-o-w! Goooo yellow!

Spirit Squad Leaders leading the "Monster Mash."

Do the Monster Mash ya'll :)

Outdoor Day:

We love Mother Earth, Mrs. Roth!

On Wednesday, we celebrated Outdoor Day!!  Thank you to those families who provided a gardening tool and gloves so we could use them in our outdoor classroom cleanup.  They certainly came in handy!  We spent from 12:15-1:00pm raking, digging, and pulling out weeds – I have many hard working nature lovers in my class J Everyone was very happy to be outside and breathe in the fresh, crisp, cool air.  Nature itself is our classroom, we can learn so much from just exploring, investigating, and inquiring with what’s right before our eyes! 

See some pictures of the wonderful scientists hard at work:

Planting a seed in the ground

You got it Jacob, yank that weed out!

Being the change we wish to see in OUR world!

Nature enthusiasts!

Roots!

Layla introducing our outdoor classroom!

 En route back to our indoor classroom!

Brody's gardening tools!

Ava's tools!

Alexander's tools!

Kurtis is ready to help our outdoor class!

We were having so much fun that later on around 2:50pm, sat outside again, this time under the pavilion with our Learning Buddies and Ms. Doka’s class to listen to a nature story.  After the read aloud, we then all went to the outdoor classroom again to introduce it to our older buddies.  My goal is to take my students there from time to time to clean it up bit by bit so we can really start utilizing this amazing space and having science lessons out there J 

Math Learning:

This week, I had your child bring in a ‘stuffy’ for us to do graphing in a fun, engaging, and meaningful way.  The students were very excited about sharing and having their cozy stuffy with them at school all day J  I even overheard  Alexander say, “Wow, we’re learning math in such a cool way!!!”  They definitely had a lot of fun and we consolidated our learning effectively as each student is now becoming more and more familiar with sorting, classifying, and building bar and pictographs using specific attributes.  My lesson was structured around the book titled: Teddy Bears at School (see picture of book).  I had the students work in small groups and sort their stuffies using one attribute and then doing a gallery walk to share their thinking.  Then, we made an illustration of our stuffy and to make a concrete pictograph.  Most of their pictures looked very similar to the actual stuffy in real life, very impressive!  Here are a few pictures from our math lesson on Thursday!   

Building our pictograph with pictures of our stuffies!

Success Criteria:

Success Criteria is another word for a checklist.  You may have heard your child use this term or seen these little checklists attached to student work. We create these lists as a class BEFORE students work on an assignment.  They are designed to help the students monitor their learning by allowing them to know exactly what they need to include in their work to achieve a level 3.  If they go above and beyond the criteria they can achieve a level 4.  We have little sayings in our classroom for each level; here's one for Level 4, it goes like this - "I did all my work, and then some more, that's why I earned a four!"  By using Success Criteria, we will be learning how to evaluate our work and identify our strengths (stars) and next steps (arrows). Eventually, we will use them in all subjects and learning skills to help the students know what they need to do to succeed.  Here is an example:

Learning Goal:  We are learning to show data on a bar graph.

Success Criteria:

____  My graph has a title

____  My graph has a title for the x axis 

____  My graph has a title for the y axis.

____  My graph has an appropriate scale.

____  My graph has labels.

____  My graph has neatly coloured bars to show the data.

____  My bars (data) match my tallies. 

Pictures of some completed pictographs:

Do you like Winter or Spring?

Do you like soccer or basketball?

Do you like Halloween or Christmas?

Character Recognition Assembly:

On Monday at 9:15am, we will be having our second Character Recognition Assembly.  In October, we focused on Cooperation.  Many students have worked extremely hard at demonstrating this trait and I am delighted by their efforts.  Character helps build a bright future!!!  Congratulations to the recipients (which I will post about on next Friday’s blog update).

Thank you Brody and family for the sun catcher!  It's beautiful and oh so appreciated!

 

Quote:

"Our Class Promise - today I will be the best person I can be.  I will respect myself, my teachers, and my classmates.  I will speak kindly to others and include them in my work and play.  I will listen with my eyes, ears, and heart.  Today, I will make good choices and I will make a DIFFERENCE!  This is who we are EVEN WHEN NO ONE IS WATCHING!"

Please ask your child about "Our Class Promise" and the actions that go along with it!  It is truly a highlight to my day watching your child demonstrate "Character" in and out of the classroom! 

Namaste,

Miss Gill