What a Great First Week!

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 That Wasn't So Bad Now Was It?

At least I hope not...

I was very happy with our first week back. We have quickly established a positive working environment, and the students maybe even had some fun; I know I did! 

In Science, we continued our look into Biodiversity by attempting to classify the leaves we collected. We will get into more formal classification, and soon the students will be expected to know the Five Traditional Kingdoms- Monera, Protists, Fungi, Plants and Animals. We also began discussing the Linnean Classification System which gets more and more specific as we go through Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and Species.

The students were asked to put the leaves into groups using whatever criteria they wanted. We had some great observations:






Today, we began listening to a podcast about the biodiversity of a simple traffic circle or roundabout. The students heard that a handful of garden dirt contains approximately 200 Billion, yes billion organisms form tens of thousands of unique microscopic species!

In Math,  we talked about the Japanese counting system which is much more intuitive than the English version. Essentially, after ten, numbers are broken down into their tens and ones. So 12 is ten-two or 10+2. 35 is three-ten-five or 3X10+5. Do you know a language that has a different system for counting than English? If so, it might be fun to share. 

We also played Four 4's where students had to use different operations to make four 4's into the numbers 0-20. For example, 4 + 4 + 4+ 4 = 16 or 4 + 4 + 4 - 4 = 12. Once they found out that any number to the power of 0 is 1, they were off to the races. This activity led us into a discussion of Multiples, our main focus along with factors for next week.

In Language, I informed the students that they would be doing an All About Me (them not me) project, but by making a website. The students are fortunate to have access to Google Sites which allows them to make great-looking websites. Don't worry, the students can not publish to the full world wide web. They have two options: one is to just share with specific people, in this case me, and the other is just to people with DDSB emails.  The default will be to just share with me and I will send a survey to see if you allow them to publish to our board. This will allow fellow students to see their work.

I demonstrated how to use the basics of Google Sites and I trust that they will be able to take what I've taught them and create some pretty cool sites.


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