Week Twenty-seven

A short week, an inconsistent weather week, but the promise of a beautiful weekend week, all adds up to a good week in my books.

6B spent a great deal of time working on the various aspects of our curriculum this week, getting through some very interesting things. In LA we moved from narrative writing (stories) to functional writing (news articles) by jumping into the creation of our own class newspaper. We are giving ourselves a few weeks to work on this, but the kids are excited. They have chosen their own editors, have assigned themselves topics to research and write on and will be laying it all out in the way they want when all is said and done. I am excited by the sense of responsibility demonstrated and look forward to seeing what they can create.

In Science we spent the week investigating the properties of air, by making experiments to demonstrate things like air's mass, volume, increased or decreased pressure, the fluidity of air or if it can be compressed. As with our last unit, the kids are deciding which topic they will explore and then designing an experiment (or using experiments I have already) and then testing them out in class. So far no fires (well, no major fires!) and many, many (many) balloons have been used. And one egg got sucked into an erlenmeyer flask!



In Social Studies, we took the occasion of the provincial election to investigate the parties involved and the main issues they are talking about. We are also using this information for some of our articles in the class newspaper.  We will continue to investigate representative democracy next week.

In CE we finished up our investigation of modern day martyrs, looking first at the story of Stephen in Acts, to see in what ways Christians face persecution today for calling themselves followers of Christ.  We will be presenting these on Monday.

All in all, a good week, and one in which we got lots accomplished. I hope you have a great weekend and look forward to seeing everyone again on Monday.

Week Twenty-five

I am  pretty sure that I am well off the right number of weeks by now. With some breaks and short weeks and general tiredness, we might well be off by 5 or 6!  Still, it was nice to get back to the classroom and see all the familiar faces.

We spent a great deal of time this week in LA doing writing. We finished up a composition piece we started before the break, which many of us had finished already, then jumped into another composition right away. "Just like riding a bike," might be the metaphor we would use to describe our process this week.  We will be moving to news article writing next week, which will allow us to combine Social Studies and LA by looking at the provincial election. We also continued to move forward in our novel study of The Cay, dealing with related subjects that come up as we are reading this interesting story.

Speaking of Social Studies, we have been studying Representative Government, both its processes and examples of it. Focusing on the representative associations that exist here in Alberta, notably the ACFA and MNA, we are looking at how representative government can provide services and represent the interests of its members. Students researched these associations and presented to the class on their findings.

In Science this week, we spent our time watching a movie based on the early days of flight. A number of intriguing and historically based flying machines were shown and we were entertained watching those machines fly or not. We will jump into explorations of the properties of air next week after we do our unit pre-test.

In CE this week we looked at martyrdom, starting with the story of Stephen in Acts 6-7 and expanded to look at current persecutions of other Christians that are happening today.

I hope you have a wonderful weekend, and we will have another great week next week.