I hope that my blog has been helpful to most of you out there! I will try and have more detailed calendar entries from now on so that you have more of an idea what your child needs to do for homework and assignments.

We are in the process of wrapping up the math unit right away. I have heard from some students that this way of division and multiplication is quite a bit different from the way their parents were taught. I totally understand this and it was different from the way I was taught too. The Math Makes Sense program really focuses on the process and different strategies to solve problems. We have just began to learn about traditional long division and multiplication. If you are more comfortable with this style feel free to get your child to do it this way. If they are comfortable with the strategy they are currently using you can let them use that way too. Eventually they will learn the traditional way after a little bit of practice. I have sent home a math worksheet that practices these skills.

The science test is tomorrow and the students seemed like they are ready for it. I told them last week that it was scheduled for Wednesday. All of the students were instructed to take home their textbook to study and from what I saw today, many did!
As a side note I would like to apologize for the amount of time it has taken for the food projects to be completed. With limited access to the laptop carts it makes it hard to get everything done within a short period of time. This project will be a main portion of the grade and will be graded by their presentation, report, and also they will be evaluated by the peers that were in their group. This means that if someone did more of the work and others did less it will show up in the peer evaluation. I understand that group work is sometimes a pain for many students but I have tried my best to make sure that every student/group has evenly split up the work. Also with the peer evaluation this allows the student to receive a better mark if he was a main person in the project.

In social we have began our First Nations unit about treaties. We will be learning what a treaty is, why they were made as well as many other things that surround treaties.

We are just about to finish our last piece of visual art in the Picasso unit. Students took 3 pictures of themselves and were instructed to cut out pieces from each picture and make a "Picasso-esk" picture. I will be placing these photo's on the website as soon as they are done!! Some of these photo's you can't even tell who the students are anymore!!
Below is an example of one of Picasso's paintings.