November was a fun filled month with many things on the go!  Students loved their traditional Indian food experience and we had our first assembly at Lakeshore School on Remembrance Day, which was beautiful and thoughtful. Our clubs are up and running, students are buzzing around the school. Thank you to all the parents who came out during parent teacher interviews, it was a pleasure to meet you all. Thank you also for all your generosity for our seniors. The outcome was incredible! We will also be saying goodbye to our student teachers as they go back to university for their final semester. December is here and we are looking forward to a well deserved break!

Important Dates

Dec 16 - Last day for student teachers

Dec 22 - Last day of school before Winter break

Jan 9 - Back to school

In-School Experiences & Upcoming Trips

We are in the midst of planning some in and out of school experiences for our grade 5 students.  Each event we plan does have a cost associated with it, as well in some cases we need parent volunteers to join us. If you do not have volunteer clearance, we encourage you to get that set up through the office. Here’s a list of upcoming events with approximate costs.

For the overnight camp we do need a commitment before we can forge ahead with planning. If you are able to volunteer please email me.

PowerSchool

Parents please make sure you are able to log in to PowerSchool and check your student’s marks.  The grade 5 team has been posting all summative assessments on this platform.  If you need any support or have any questions about PowerSchool, please feel free to contact your child’s teacher.

Language Arts

The students have been exploring figurative language. We have completed tasks with a focus on figurative language used in poems and analyzing the meaning behind the text. Students have also practiced writing similes, metaphors, hyperboles, personification, onomatopoeias, alliteration (bring on the Alphabet Aerobics!), and idioms. This is a huge topic and one we love and hear everywhere. Rhythm and Poetry are everywhere, particularly in the music we all party to - so here’s a playlist to jam to while we work - HipHop Poetics: A Classroom Playlist. All bangers, no duds. We promise. The final project for the figurative language unit will have the students writing their own poem, including the different figurative language techniques, and then presenting it to the class. Students are also encouraged to continue to read at home on the ReadTheory platform.

Social Studies

We will be finishing up our Regions of Canada unit this month.  The final project will consist of researching the  Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Lowlands Region, which will include a written component,  presentation media choice, and then teaching a pal. Resources, links, and information for all things Regions can be found here: Regions of Canada Resources. We encourage you all to take time to explore this with your child as Canada is one awesome place.

Math

We are wrapping up our focus on this term's Statistics and Probability concepts. We’ve practised our surveying skills, developed and recorded data using different strategies and then recorded this data using double bar graphs. Taking our conversations about the novel Thirst further, students recorded their water usage last week and then took the time to create a bar graph to visualize just how much water we use. It’s insane and we don’t even think about it.

With surveys and graphing finished we then kicked off a look at the concepts of probability and ways we can show or calculate the likelihood of different events. We took the time to learn how we can identify outcomes of experiments and then use them to make predictions. Now, believe it or not, the Carnival is coming to Lakeshore School. The grade fives will be creating their own carnival games where they will design and then build their own games of chance - with the goal of creating games that can make the most money. We ain’t crooks here, we’re just using math to make that cash money! In doing so, they’ll need to explain the theoretical probability versus the experimental probability of their games. This is going to be tons of fun and we look forward to all the games that the students will make. 

Following the end of the carnival game project, we will begin our work on multiplication and division - specifically double digit multiplication and long division, using the DMSB algorithm. While learning and mastering their basic facts is important at all times, it is particularly important with multiplication and REALLY important when working with long division.  

Science

With Classroom Chemistry, students finished exploring the types of mixtures and ways we can separate them according to their attributes. Students created crystals by exploring the nature of solutions and how we can super saturate mixtures using combinations of solutes and solvents. Moving forward, students will continue applying their knowledge of the scientific method as focus turns to the use of acids and bases in everyday life. Hold on tight when we kick off a number of explosive (literally) experiments to learn about reversible (physical) vs irreversible (chemical) reactions. As always, we strongly encourage all students to regularly reference and explore the resources in the Classroom Chemistry section of the Science Resources page as well as the links shared on the Classroom Chemistry Web Links page.

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Like we said, it’s busy here in the wild world of grade five so here’s looking at another awesome month. Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns.

Sincerely,

Daniel Polsky

Grade 5 Teacher | Lakeshore School
Calgary Board of Education | cbe.ab.ca
Twitter | @mr_polsky
Instagram | @mr.polsky

Website | mrpolsky.com