Accountable Talk / Growth Mindset and Fixed Mindset

In Grade 4, we have been improving our communication skills by having discussions using "accountable talk" sentence starters. 

These sentence starters help us actively share and respond to other people's ideas to build our understandings about various topics. When we are accountable for what we say, we support and defend our claims with evidence.  

In the video below, we read The Giving Tree by Shel Silverstein and came up with our own discussion questions.

When we use accountable take to discuss books, we are improving our oral language skills as well as our reading comprehension skills by connecting,  predicting, inferring and visualising!

Below, we are discussing the differences between having a growth mindset and fixed mindset.

Take a look at the video and the poster below to find out more about these concepts!

On another note, today we had a celebration party since we reached our goal of reading 100 books as a class! Each one of these chains represents a book that was read by a student. 

Our next goal is to read 250 books by the end of the school year. 

If you are interested in participating and starting your own chain, please come by to speak to Miss d'Amours! 

Self-Regulation

In grade 2, we have been inquiring about the different feelings we have. 

We realized that most of our feelings can be sorted into four "zones". 

When we are happy, calm, and ready to learn, we are in the green zone. 

When we start to get silly, distracted, upset, frustrated, or too excited, we are in the yellow zone. 

When we are angry, out of control, mean, or mad, we are in the red zone. 

When we feel sad, sick, tired or hurt, we are in the blue zone. 

When we notice we are not in the green zone, we need to stop and take a break. 

We choose a strategy to help us go back to the green zone so that we are ready to learn again. 

This is called self-regulating!

We can choose to hug a stuffy...

use a calming jar...

or go for a walk on the second floor. 

We always carry a sand timer to make sure we come back within five minutes. 

When we are learning, there are other strategies we can use to stay focused. 

When we would like to work or read quietly,
we choose to use these earmuffs which muffles out some of the sounds.

Don't worry; we can still hear the important instructions!

We can also use these "forcefields" to help us focus on what we are doing.

Happy self-regulating everyone!

*We are adapting a program called the Zones of Regulation which was developed by Leah Kuypers. 

If you would like to find out more about the program and self-regulation, please follow this link. 

Second Week of School

Last week we kick started our first unit of inquiry with the central idea, "our senses help us to learn about and interpret the world around us."

We took a walk around the school and realized that we learn a lot about our surroundings using our five senses: sight, smell, hearing, touch, and taste. 

In the classroom, we thought about the different body parts we use to learn about objects. Then, we brainstormed what we already knew about each sense. 

It looks like we already knew lots about our senses!

In language, we learned how to pick good-fit books using the "I PICK" strategy. 

When we use I PICK, we think about the purpose of reading a book and our own interests. Then, we make sure we understand what's happening in the book, and if we know all the words. 

We also had our first Writer's Workshop, which is a time where we work on our writing skills. 

Our first writing trait is "ideas", so we each brought in a piece of treasure from home. 

We wrote about our treasures and why they are special to us, and afterwards shared what we wrote with our classmates in the author's chair. 

Look at those proud faces!

In art, each table group created flags for their teams. 

We used our social skills and communication skills to make sure everyone was participating and working together. 

We also learned about being bucket fillers. Bucket fillers are people who do nice things to other people. When we fill other people's buckets, we end up filling our own too! 

You can find out more about being a bucket filler from reading this book. 

In our class, we give our pompoms to people who were kind to us. 

The jars in the pictures below represent buckets. 

As you can see, our class is full of bucket fillers!

Well, bye for now! 

See you next time :)

First Week of School

During our first week of school, we talked about how we would like our class to be like. 

We discussed how it should look like, feel like, and sound like, and came up with a class agreement. 

Everyone signed their names at the bottom of the paper to make this important promise. 

In art, we made identity grids. 

We folded a square piece of paper so that it would have 16 squares, and put the letters in our names in some of the squares. 

Then, we filled the other squares with things that are important to us and special memories we have!

Wow! Look at all the beautiful colours!

In math, we learned a new activity called "power towers" to work on our addition and subtraction skills. 

Each cup has a math question on the top, that we try to solve. 

The answer is written on the inside of the cup. 

If we get it right, we get to add it on to build a tower! 

If we make a mistake, we need to start over again. 

We used our social skills to cooperate together to create some cool designs.

We had an exciting first week of school!