SIS Blog: September 2019

Thursday, September 26, 2019

Week 5 Term 1 Library

We used to have a tree in our JIES library and we are in the process of building a new one for SIS. The children made some leaves for the canopy to celebrate the fall equinox!

Some of the students briefly looked at the book entitled "If the World Were a Village" by David Smith. We were open-minded and wondered if the world had just 100 people in it (instead of 6.8 billion humans) what it would be like. We wondered what the village would look like, how the people would act and what they would do.

Many of the children listened to the librarian read "The Pink Hat." The story is about a hat that blows in the wind everywhere in a city. The hat is used as a foot warmer, a toy for a pet, a boxing glove, a purse, a swimming cap, a mitt, and a baby's blanket. When the girl grows up, she uses it to promote girl power! This is another one of those open-minded books.

The younger children watched a video about Mr. Ginger learning to take care of books properly.

We decided that we don't need to color the black and white pages of books. Coloring books are for that! Also, we don't need to damage books by reading them in our bathtubs.

Grade 4 - Week 5

It has been a very brief week - but packed with activities linked to our next line of inquiry: 'Success, challenge and failure strengthen our personal identity'. The children have begun to explore their own mindsets and reflect on how they view the themes of success, failure and challenge. They then decided to find out the mindset of other children in the school by designing and then conducting a survey based on attitudes towards these three themes.

The children came up with 10 survey questions and then interviewed Grades 1 - 6 to find their responses to the questionnaire. Children then used the skills they have been learning about in mathematics to represent the data collected in graph form.

We will continue our inquiry by investigating the lives of well-known successful people who have overcome obstacles and challenges in order to succeed in their goals.

Grade 5: Week 5

This week has been short but busy. The children finished their biographies and spent a lot of time editing and improving to make sure that they are engaging for the reader and text appropriate. Grade 5 created a checklist and assessed their own and their peers work against the criteria. They're excited to share these with you at the Celebration of Learning in a couple of weeks. In guided reading, the children have continued to develop their reading skills by reading texts narrated from the perspective of two children during World War Two, one who lived in Japan and the other in the USA. The children made some interesting connections between the texts and our unit of inquiry.

In maths, we began to apply our place value knowledge to the four operations. Using base 10 counters and bar models, the children worked to create visual models of written addition and subtraction equations and calculations in order to support their understanding. Grade 5 worked together to look for patterns and make predictions before they completed their equations so that they could be more efficient mathematicians.

'No matter how small we are, we can still make a difference.'

Grade 5 have been following the news over the last few weeks and making connections to the work we have been doing in class. We've been very intrigued by the work of Greta Thunberg and were amazed by the number of children who took part in the environmental protests that took place around the world last Friday. In inquiry, we looked at campaign and protest posters. Together the children analysed the colours and symbols, discussed what they meant and thought about what impact the posters had on them.