Binders, New Blog Features and Spiralling

 Well, it has been a great two weeks, and as I anticipated, this will be a fun year with lots of great learning. I wanted to update you on a few items that will be put into place now that we are in the swing of things.

Binders

I don't hand out duotangs in Grade 6. I have nothing against them, although opening the tabs to put something in is kind of annoying, placing a sheet in the middle of the duotang is quite cumbersome, having to have a bunch of them to keep track of can be tricky and ordering the right number in a variety of colours can be tricky, too. Ok maybe I do have something against them!

Instead, I suggest all students use a binder system. This way, notes from a variety of subjects can be kept in the same place with the aid of dividers. It is also good practice as your child heads towards their Intermediate years, or even High School.

New Blog Pages

I will begin to add subject-specific pages to the blog to let you know the curriculum we are covering. While this is time consuming, I think it is an important connection form home to the classroom. As a parent of three school-aged kids, I know all about the, "What are learning about in Science?"-type questions we ask, and are frequently greeted with a curt, "Nothing."

This way you will know exactly what we are learning about, as I cut out the middle-person in the line of communication. While I think this is informative, my blog statistics in the past have suggested it does not get used much throughout the year. As I mentioned, it adds quite a bit to my plat to keep it updated, so if it isn't getting used I may stop the updates.

Speaking of Subject Specific...

I spiral our math units. What is spiraling you ask? It is a method of organizing units into small, weekly chunks. This way we focus on one or two specific goals each week, then revisit this topic later in the year with a different focus for the topic. This way, students are accessing all parts of the math curriculum at frequent intervals throughout the year. I have found this to be very effective in building important math foundations.

Many weeks, in fact probably most, there will be a short quiz or some sort of assessment at the end of the week to see how things went.