Welcome to grade 6! For those of you families who are returning this year, welcome back to the grade 6 experience, and for those of you who are new to grade 6, you are in for a great year.
This is the first post in my weekly updates on what is happening in grade 6, and the reason I do it, is that it is great way for me to put out information to families that can be accessed at any time which is convenient for you. Generally I update it every Friday (though I do do the occasional Saturday update!) and I try to give a flavour of what the week was like in my classroom. Feel free to drop by here anytime, and I may even be able to include some pictures or video.
This week was a rollercoaster mixed with a whirling dervish of activities. I was so impressed with how well the kids have begun to adjust to the demands of our schedule and figuring out where they need to be, when they need to be there. The schedule and how to navigate it to find our classes occupied the majority of our first couple of days. We were able to begin to introduce subjects as well, for which Science, CE, and composition/reading being the main ones kids saw me.
In Science we began to explore what defines a tree, and then started looking at the parts of a tree too. I am hoping to get quite a bit further, including identifying the nutrient cycle and food chains next week. For now though, the kids simply need to finish off their title pages by Tuesday.
In CE, the kids were given all the memory verses they will be learning this year. We also talked about ways they can work with their natural strengths to best learn these verses every week. I definitely encouraged all of the kids to keep the verses somewhere that they do their work regularly, so they can look at the verses a little bit every day. Verse tests will be on either Wednesday or Thursday and make up the bulk of their mark in CE this year. I have also put out the challenge to memorise the 66 books of the bible in the correct order as a bonus "verse", so don't be surprised if you see your child working on that as well. Finally, we identified Matt 22:37-40 as the foundation for what we are doing this year in CE. I encourage you to look it up and discuss with your child why this verse is so important for Christ-followers to remember.
LA was a blast this week. We identified the things we want to achieve in our learning and started down that path. There was no assignments due, but we did create a composition in class called "My Memories of Grade 6". This was essentially the kids looking forward to June, imagining how their year went and describing how they reached their goals as if they had already done it. We will refine these pieces over the next week and then I can maybe post them when done. We also had our first book exchange of the year, started to re-familiarise ourselves with the library routines and look forward every Thursday having all our books in and avoiding any fines for late returns.
In Social Studies, our week centred on looking at the processes of democracy and decision-making. We learned about Autocracy, Oligarchy and Democracy as the three main categories of how groups of people have decided to guide the decision-making for themselves. We also finished up the Pro & Con debate on the use of cell phones that was begun the previous week at camp.
Finally, I want to thank you all of you who came out on Thursday night, for taking the time meet me and see where it is your child is learning. I so look forward to seeing the families of the people I spend so much time with during the week. If you didn't get a chance to come in, the please, come see me another time. And I am always available by e-mail too (quinn.barreth@pallisersd.ab.ca).
I want to wish you a great long weekend (again? already? ;-D) and look forward to updating you on our week next Friday.
