A busy week at Beachy Cove Elementary

We had another very busy day today, focusing on several larger-scale projects in both English and French. 3 more students presented very high-quality Book Reports, and we began a fact-finding project about the animals from Salmonier Nature Park. The class is moving along quickly through our Novel Study, and will be starting a unit on Digestion in health tomorrow.  I have a few fun projects up my sleeve for this one, and will keep you updated as much as possible.

A few notes for this week:

• From 7pm - 10pm on November 25th, Beachy Cove Elementary will receive 15% of sales at Chapters in St. John's. I would suggest that any parents/students/family members/friends looking for books as gifts or for themselves take the opportunity to support literacy and fundraising at BCE. I will be there for part of the evening, probably hiding in the self-help section.
• BCE's Count your Blessings project continues, with full details on the BCE homepage (http://www.beachycove.ca/)
• Please continue to review Multiplication Facts at home, using the strategies outlined on the sheet I sent home and/or the games on my blog. Don't forget that all posts I have ever put up on the bog are available in the archives on the right-hand side of the page.

I wanted to mention a few things about my attempts to corral the creative outputs of my class over this week. Many students enjoy creating drawings, cards, comics, stories and other artwork during their free time or after they have finished their work. I wholly encourage this, but it has a tendency to get spread around. So, I have given each student a DuoTang to store their artwork in and asked that it be at school each day to collect their work. I also plan on using these DuoTangs to help plan class art projects and focus students' efforts on finished products and improving their skills.

 

As with the last book reports, anybody who would like a copy of my evaluation for their report can get one if they ask. It takes a few minutes to type up a "good copy", but just let me know and I can have one ready the next day. 

We had a great discussion today as a pre-evaluation for an activity about the usefulness of waterways such as lakes and rivers. It centered around the Lower Churchill project, and we discussed lots of elements from our social studies and science curricula. The class showed great interest in talking about sustainability, monetary and environmental costs, as well as how our use of water has changed over time.

This rolled over into a written activity, which I evaluated on the spot and gave feedback on. In general it was very well done, and served as a good reminder that there are still things we all have to focus on. I would suggest that if you are working on projects at home, students should pay close attention to reading for detail, copying words accurately, and showing good use of punctuation and capital letters.

A great day all together, here's to another tomorrow! Buddy Reading, here we come.