The classroom of Mrs. Langlois

Students have been working hard on their Who Would Win Books. It is to be completed by tomorrow so students can do the self-evaluation on Wednesday. Some students are complete and are receiving additional time on their writers workshop projects. Other students have decided to use their writers workshop time in the afternoon as additional opportunities to complete their work. Students will be excited to share these books with you at conferences in November. This afternoon, students were introduced to their major project for Science. They have been invited to create a building proposal for the new arena. It was mentioned to the students that our contact from the Saddledome is very interested in seeing the proposals of from the students. This made some students very anxious and others excited. We have decided that if we are proud of our work we will share beyond our wall of our school, but it will be optional. Expect in the following weeks some questions from your child as we dive d

Yesterday we went on a field study where we explored 6 different buildings. The buildings we explored were the Calgary Tower, City Hall, Central Library, The Bow Tower, Telus Sky, the Bay Building and Olympic Plaza (GA).  We noticed that the Central Library is very different from The Fish Creek Library (SW).  This afternoon we created a Venn Diagram to help show the similarities and differences between the each library. Today in Science we continued to talk about structures and Mrs. Langlois chose a student to pick a building and the other students had to guess it (AF). Some of the important questions one can ask are What is the purpose of the building? Who is the audience of the building? and What special features does the building have. Understanding the features, purpose and audience of each building helps us learn the buildings story.

Today at school we had a Math problem. We are suppose to figure out how many pencils might be in two boxes if there is about 500 pencils (TD). We tried multiple strategies to figure out the answer (KC). For example some used a picture, division, and adding. This problem was an easier problem to learn the process of problem solving. In Science we were planning and talking about our field study tomorrow. We get to learn more about the new central library and other interesting buildings around the area. Our purpose for tomorrow field study is to explore different buildings and be able to compare them (GA). At the end of the day today we did exploration time. We had building centers. We were building structures (DD). This is to get us ready for our big project which we will be introduced to next week. Reminders - Tomorrow is our field study - dress for the weather. Only bring items that are needed in our backpack. Leave everything else at home.

I am so sorry that I have not posted anything on the Blog this week. On Wednesday we went to the Fish Creek Library and we were looking at different things that caught our eye (GA).  We noticed that the shape of the library is a broken a part pyramid (JS). When we came into the building we got to watch a slide show of old pictures of when the library was being built. After we got to explore the whole library (AF). Some students read, some students played, some students crafted and some explored. One of the things we learned is there is an amphitheater hidden under the floor and this is where they store things. They couldn't finish this part of the library because there wasn't enough money (DS).  I never knew they had so many offices (ST). The library was built in 1983 (SC). Today we sketched the Fish Creek Library and answered some of the questions we had about the story of that building (TD).   Today we finished our read aloud called "A series of Unfortunate Events

Happy Friday parents and students of room 7, We have had a busy week in class. Students continue to work hard on their who would win books, learning new mathematical concepts and discussing their structures. The mathematical concept we are currently exploring is estimation. We began looking at building our spatial awareness of estimation and moved towards numerical estimation, specifically rounding. Students were taught a new game today to help practice the skill of rounding. Ask what the game was called and how could you play it at home. The picture of the game board is below. In Science we began to dive deeper into what is a structure and realized that a structure could be about anything. We therefore decided to look at what is a "building structure". Ask your child about the Frayer model we used to help define a building structure. Reminders Walking field study to Fish Creek Library Wednesday afternoon Field trip forms due back by next Thursday (I forgot to

This week has been a busy week. Students are working hard on their 'Who Would Win' books. Today we started to create our rubric. This will help students know where they can improve their work and how they can provide feedback to a peer. We have 3 categories; content (the sentence and what is in it), mechanics (punctuation, capitalization, spelling) and the picture. It was nice to hear students say "I know I need to add more information to my page to make it a 3." Ask your child where they think they may be on the rubric. Student Voice:  "Today was fun lunch and we had little ceasars" (KC) "This week we had a building challenge and the kids built their challenge with paper and it had to be 4 cm above the ground" (SW) "Today at Math we were learning rounding to the nearest 10. Rounding up or down" (DD) "Today for Science we did our writing in our visual journals and we were writing down if our structure were structure or not a