Happy Monday

We have been working on creating learning goals for ourselves for math, reading and writing. These are goals that we have created for ourself based on our own perceived learning needs. We picked goals that we can evaluate and that can be applied to things we will learn as the year goes on. Ms. Binks will be posting our goals in a pocket with our name on it. Throughout the year (and coming up in December at conferences) we will talk about if we feel we have reached our goals. If we do, we will put a sticker on our pocket and write a new goal. Today we worked on personal goals that could be around behaviour, friendships, emotions, skills in art, music or phys ed.

Mrs. Ball continued to teach us about collecting data. Today, we talked about what makes up a good question and then questions we could ask our classmates to gather information. Lots of us created questions where we had to pick our favourite of something. For example, what is your favourite video game? After we created our question, we chose 4 items or categories that the people we were surveying would have to choose. We then had an opportunity to walk around and gather answers using tally marks. This week we will be working on changing our data we collected today into pictographs.

In social studies we learned a new phrase called "Quality of Life"
Quality of life is the sense of safety, comfort, security, health and happiness that people have in their lives. We talked about how lucky we are in Canada because most people have a good quality of life. We brainstormed some things that make our quality of life great. Our brainstorm chart is below....

We started to have an interesting conversation about perspective and how even though we may see people in different countries as having a poorer quality of life because what they have is different than us they may view their lives as great quality. We used the example of a bed and how if we saw a child in another part of the world who had a bed as a straw mat we may think they are worse off than we are where in reality they may be very happy and grateful to have the mat. This is a conversation that Ms. Binks is hoping we can continue and build on through our discoveries in social studies.

In science this afternoon we continued our work around rocks and minerals. Mrs. Ball showed us a video by Bill Nye to help us learn some interesting facts. We learned things like:
- There are 3 types of rocks called igneous, metamorphic and sedimentary
- Soil is made out of rocks, sand, roots and plants
- Rocks are made from heat and pressure
- The only thing that can cut diamond is diamond
- Some rocks are made from lava from a volcano that cools off
- Some rocks can have different layers or can be a swirl of different minerals that are combined

We did not have any new spelling words today. Ms. Binks is going to try having 2 different spelling groups with different words for each group. She is hoping to start these groups tomorrow or Wednesday and then do testing next week since there is no school this Friday.

Reminders:
- Book orders are due TOMORROW
- Fun lunch orders are due next Tuesday
- Please bring library books back for tomorrow
- No school on Friday