Our week so far...

This week we welcomed Mrs. Ball, our student teacher from University of Lethbridge. She will be in our classroom until right before Christmas break. She will be teaching us all about rocks and minerals and graphing. Some of us will be working with her to complete projects around Alberta (the grade 4 social studies curriculum).

We have ended our review on addition and subtraction. Students will be taking home numerous addition and subtraction quizzes this week. Please go through the quiz with your child. Some students will have notes about the importance of continuing their adding and subtracting at home. Ms. Binks can send home some extra practice if needed. Our adding and subtracting skills will come in handy as we move forward in math to learn about graphing and multiplication.

In social studies we have continued our work around mapping. Students have been working on completing activities where they need to plot specific items on maps, read and follow the cardinal directions, measure and use scale and use grids to write down coordinates. Later this week we will begin our focus on the county of India.

We are wrapping up our activities around compound words. Next week our daily 5 activities will focus on using nonfiction literature and how to properly gather and write down facts and information. Our spelling test words will focus on topics that we are learning about.

This week we did an activity around writing where we divided our brain into 3 pockets. We talked about how our "brain pockets" help keep ideas that we can then use to develop our writing. The 3 brain pockets are:
- Memory (these are ideas about people, places, pets and events that we remember)
- Information (these are true facts about topics we feel we know a lot about)
- Imagination (ideas that we create using our own imaginations)
We had to begin to create a story using an idea from our imagination brain pocket. We will start to work on story writing in the upcoming weeks.

Reminders:
- Our Pillars of Care assembly is this Friday at 8:15. Students who are receiving awards will have brought home a special letter today
- Friday is a half day