POI Thinking Journals

Today 4.2 students will bring home their POI Thinking Journals to share with you.  Please look through their work together with them and let them tell you about all of the things that we have been doing in our unit.  Please don't forget to send the POI Journals back into school with the students on Tuesday as we use them everyday!  Thanks!

Portfolio Day

Our Grade 4 Portfolio Day will be on Friday, November 5th.  The session will begin at 9:35 a.m. and end at 10:25 a.m.  We welcome you to attend and have a look at all of the wonderful things we have been doing this year in Grade 4.  Portfolio Day will be followed by our student led Parent, Student, Teacher Conferences on November 16th.  

Oral Presentations

This unit, our summative assessment will be an oral presentation.  In order to get us prepared, we have talked about what a good oral presentation should look like and what sorts of things it should include.  We talked about the need to focus on eye contact, volume, expression and clarity, speed of speech, gestures/body language, information included and response to task.  This week we looked at articles that addressed our line of inquiry: The impact of water on human activity.  The articles talked about how lack of water and proper sanitation can impact people's health and their education.  We then created an oral presentation in groups about how water can impact on education or how water can impact on health.  Take a look at some of things we learned.

While we were presenting, we peer assessed each other using our Oral Presentation Rubric.  We used this assessment to make a goal for our summative assessment presentation.  By the time of our summative assessment, our oral presentation skills will have improved because of all of our practice!

Conceptual Understandings

We have been developing our understanding of mathematical concepts throughout the school year.  Recently, we have been looking at our understanding of the statement 'Number operations can be modeled in a variety of ways'.  We unpacked this statement and discovered that we can demonstrate our understanding of multiplication, division, addition and subtraction in many different ways. 

What are some of the ways that we can represent our understanding of multiplication?  Why is important to show our understanding in different ways?

Reflecting on Sharing the Planet

Think about our transdisciplinary theme: Sharing the Planet.  Together we have read aloud the book One Well by Rochelle Strauss.  We have also looked at some videos that talked about water issues.  Look through your notes from the reading and spend some time thinking about the other things we have talked about regarding water to help you reflect. 

What do you want to find out more about?  What have you learned that is new?  What surprised you the most?  How do you feel right now?

A Word from Mr. Coffey

Is homework a benefit or a curse?  Does it improve student learning or turn students away from learning? Is it the secret of academic success or does it diminish the quality of life for students? I invite all parents to attend a talk on the subject of "Rethinking Homework" in the Dahms Theater at 19.00 on Wednesday, October 27th.

Symmetrical Images

We have been having fun investigating symmetry in our math lessons recently.  We've talked about lines of symmetry and mirror images.

Take a look at some of the wonderful symmetrical images we created today: