What a Week!

So, we are off and rolling on our grade 6 adventure!  It was four long days, that flew by, depending on who you were talking to.  We have set off on out adventure in learning with 26 young explorers who all have shown a willingness to get involved, and take action this week.  There were plenty of opportunities for class members to share their thoughts, and ideas this week, and I am happy to say that every student stepped up into the spotlight at some point in our first few days.  The group will still take a little bit of time to get fully comfortable, but with 15 students returning from the group I worked with last year, and 10 of the other students being students from 5/6 classes at Churchill last year, we are jumping right into things really.
We spent some time this past week with icebreaking activities to get everyone feeling safe, and learning about each other.  Then we jumped into some reflective writing in our journals, some creative writing in Language (ask about our 'wanted' posters), and some review of basic number sense in Math.  Place value, basic operations, patterning, and data management (graphing and reading graphs) will be what we are focusing on in math over the coming weeks, along with some diagnostic work.  In science we had an introduction to our first unit, dealing with the properties of air and flight.  And please quiz your student on the seven elements of design.  We covered it the first day, and the third day, and they will revisit it all year long in visual arts, so some review of these elements at home would help build their vocabulary (Colour, Value, Space, Shape, Form, Texture, and Line).
During some of the community building activities we took time out to view the video below.  Students were asked to describe the actions of the players/students in the video with a single word or phrase.  Their list of descriptors was very much an inspiration when they worked together to create a set of guidelines for our class community.  Check out the story here..

Middle School Football Team's Life Changing Play

Of course the class also found some inspiration from Kid President via a couple of videos we watched over nutrition break this week..

The class has already taken on some leadership roles within the school by helping to organize and introduce some great recess activities to the yard (ask about our giant connect four boards).  They also did some great team building work during our first visit to the gym.  Ask your child about our new Omni Ball...
This week we are looking forward to our trip to the park with the grade 5/6 from 310.  We also are going to dive deeper into the properties of air and flight in science, and will be doing some autobiographical work in language.  If you can please send in your email address so I can create a class mailing list, I can get some information directly to you this week regarding other events, and trips coming up.
Happy second week!
Ray