Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back...

Welcome back to school parents and students!
I hope you all had a great holiday and got out in the snow (and sun, Lyam).

A bit of information from last term first:
I haven't heard from anyone so I assume that you all received the term 1 reports via email on the last day of school. If you have any constructive feedback (positive or negative) in regards to the new reports I'm sure that Marilyn and Mike would like to hear it. From my perspective I found the reports much better the old ones as I was able to add more import information in a more concise manner. In saying that they did take triple the amount of time to write :/ (hence the lack of blog updates the last two weeks of school).

The next two weeks:
From today until next Friday (18th) we have a large block of learning and activities to focus on these include;

• Inquiry project
• Continuing division in maths with a review test on Friday 18th
• focus on writing book reviews and starting Raz Kids

In my next post I will put up the assignment outline for this units Inquiry unit, the scoring rubric and a student self-assessment.

This week we will continue to work on division after a few weeks break. We will focus on long division, dividing by three by one digit numbers, dividing with zeros, and mental division. Extending students in this unit will continue their good work that they were doing with Shannon. Unfortunately Shannon had to go back to Australia until Easter to teach kids how to surf and ride mountain bikes (poor guy), but we will be getting someone in to take his place. The students who still need help getting up to speed in this unit will also continue to get tailored work and support as well. Towards the end of the week I will make a batch of photocopies  plus other work that cover everything that we have learnt in division so everyone has a good chance to practice and review before the test next week. 

These two weeks will also be about reading, reading, reading. We have started our unit on book reviews so we need to read as many books as we can. When we have done that we can reflect on them by writing a book review. I have three types of book review for the students to choose from so everyone is able to write one (or two, or three,...) even the EAL students.

Homework this week:

• Read
• book reviews (at least one book review due by Friday)
• research Inquiry project (this will be done in school as well)
• Read some books and look around Raz kids http://www.raz-kids.com/

I will add some more information tomorrow about what we did the last few weeks as well as information about the Inquiry project.