Farewell to a Friend

 This week we began inquiring into our 3rd line of inquiry, “Our responsibility in virtual and social media environments.” To start, we shared ouir responsibilities as members of our home and school communities. The students came up with many different things that the are expected to do such as feeding their pet, doing their homework and following classroom agreements. We followed that up with a discussion on why people need to have responsibilities and came to the conclusion that they often help keep us and others safe. So then we talked about dangers online and the students were surprisingly aware of things such as online scams, computer viruses and tracking! Finally, we looked at ways to be responsible digital leaders/ citizens. 

We also sent out our technology surveys to other grades, teacher s and parents and gathered a lot of data. Thank you to all who replied! The students looked over the results with their groups and shared the things that they learned or found interesting. 

In PE we continued with cooperative games such as relay races, stepping stones. The students are really getting good at helping each other. 

Today we were able to meet our goal of reaching 1000 class points! So we were able to hold a class party to celebrate and to say good bye to Yuuma! It was a lot of fun as the students enjoyed sharing snacks with each other. 

We will miss Yuuma and the rest of his family and wish them all the best in their next adventure! 

Influence of Technology

 This week we focused on how technology influences our lives. We discussed the positive and negative influence that it has and discussed what things we can do for fun without technology. The students had some great ideas such as reading books, playing board games and biking around outside.

In order to find out more about the role that technology plays in peoples lives, we decided to create some surveys to ask people in our school community questions about how they use technology in their lives and how they use it to work and connect with each other. We watched a short video explaining tips on how to make good survey questions and then in groups brainstormed questions to ask different people in the school community such as students, teachers and parents. Then the students chose one of the group questions and worked on coming up with the answers that people might respond with. Then after writing drafts of the questions in our unit notebooks we turned to technology to help as the students worked in their groups to create a Google Form Survey. We will check over and edit the forms on Monday and then share them with the community to collect some responses. Please answer the survey when you receive it next week.

In math this week, we continued with our unit on time and we looked at the different measurement units for time (seconds, minutes, hours, days, months….) We had some fun estimating and experimenting with how many things we could do in a minute, such as walk around the room, or stand up and sit down. We also tried a balancing challenge to see how long the students could stand on one foot without wobbling! Two of them went as long as 3 minutes and could have gone on longer.

In PE, we continued working on self-control and cooperation skills with partners and small groups. 

We also had our first whole school assembly of the year, hosted by the school choir. Grade 2 will host the assembly in March!

Finding Out About How Technology is Organized

 This week most of our focus was on the second part of our first line of inquiry; how technology is organized. To understand this better we narrowed our focus on technology to the different computers and similar smart devices. We began with what the students knew about computer technology and covered the different parts of computers, including both the hardware and software. We sorted out different computer components as either hardware or software, and then sorted some of the hardware devices into input devices or output devices.

Our next step was to look at computer networks and the Internet. We watch short a video on BrainPop Jr, as well as a slideshow about Networks. Then the students worked in differentiated reading groups to discover things about how the Internet was created and how it works.

To end the week, we began inquiring into our second line of inquiry, the Influence of technology on organizations and communities. Working in their table groups, the students came up with lists of positive and negative ways in which technology influences us. 

In math, we turned our attention to reading digital and analogue clocks. We also played a fun Kahoot game to review how to tell the time.

In language, apart from practicing our spelling words for todays tests, we also wrote about our favourite classes in school and began a unit on writing letters and email!

Finally, in PE we continued to focus on playing well with others and worked on using self-control when moving about the playground. On Wednesday, we had a special treat as the grade 5/6 students joined us for a few games. It was a lot of fun playing together.

Speaking of playing together, it’s time to sign up for after school clubs! Some clubs could use a few more members so if you haven’t signed up yet please do so before next Tuesday or else the club that you want might get cancelled!

Sign up for Student Clubs here!

Sign up for Parent Clubs here!

NO School on MONDAY!

Please don’t come to school next Monday, September 18th as it is a national holiday!