Updates and Ideas

I hope you are all healthy and staying safe :) - I miss you all so very much!

Currently we are all asked to be patient while the CBE makes a plan going forward. Please give yourself permission to take it easy this week. Play, cook, sew, draw, read, and play some more!

Some parents have inquired about ways to support their child's learning at home. More information will be coming out in the days ahead. In the meantime, IF you are interested, here is a list the learning we had planned for this week:

Math:Continue practicing your Number Facts and Subtraction.

• practice skip counting by 2, 5, and 10. Starting at any given number counting forwards and backwards.
• practice basic math facts through playing card games
• make it into a game of WAR - pick your operation (adding or subtracting), each player chooses a card at the same time and you race to say the answer. The quickest response takes the cards

Art and Games for Cognitive Flexibility: Play board games! Here are a few to try: Cribbage, Card games, Monopoly, Scrabble, Boggle, Checkers

Inquiry:
-Work on your design thinking challenge for the Arctic. Work through the ideation process and prototype. For fun, if you want to build your prototype and send your teacher a picture, we can post it on the blog!
-Check out this fun movie about life in the Arctic - David Suzuki and the Nature of Things follows two different groups of polar bears: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x5eseix 
-Explore some other options for documentaries such as Planet Earth, Frozen Planet, and Human Planet. These are all amazing documentaries where students can continue to make connections about what we have done in the class and to the world. 

Writing: Continue writing your arctic stories - type up on google docs and share with your teacher

Reading: Raz kids  https://www.raz-kids.com/

Don’t forget to go outside and play: Try this scavenger hunt: https://www.cbc.ca/parents/content/pdf/CBCParents_WinterScavengerHunt.pdf

Designing for the Future

Reminders

• Please remember to bring in your materials to build your prototype for the Arctic Design Thinking Challenge
• Please remember to return your library books and home reading
• Please remember to return your home journals 

• With the changing provincial and local response to COVID-19, school conferences will be postponed until a later date.
• Please continue checking your email for any updates from Alberta Health and the CBE.  

Learning Highlights

• We got to watch the Wicked Witch of the Wetlands by Evergreen Theatre.

"We learned about the wetlands, we learned that we should not litter."

"We learned that we should not pollute the wetlands 

because there are lots of important animals there that should be protected." 

• We have also continued on with our arctic story writing. We started by looking at some examples, and then tried it ourselves - making sure to meet our success criteria:

• In the beginning of the story we had to introduce the characters and include a descriptive setting!
• For Inquiry, we are applying our knowledge of heat and temperature in the Arctic to solving a problem in the Arctic: (a) permafrost (b) flooding (c) storm surges
• Here are some images of us creating our initial design:

After our initial designs, we shared them with people in our class and collected feedback.Using the feedback, we went back into our designs and added some improvements to finalize our designs.

Next, we plan to build a prototype of our final designs. As we work on our designs, we have been checking back to our success criteria to make sure we are on track:

Each student has created a list of materials they plan on bringing in for their prototype - please remember to bring these in for building the final prototype. 

• In Math, we are continuing to learn about double digit subtraction with regrouping. Ask your child to show you what they understand!

Celebration of Learning

Reminders:

• Please remember to bring home reading books and library books back next week
• Math practice has been sent home with students - please remember to bring the word problems booklet back, but the additional subtraction and addition practice booklet does not need to be returned.
• Dates to remember:

  Mar. 9 – Rescheduled Evergreen Theatre (The Wicked Witch of the Wetlands) at 2:00pm

  
  

  Mar. 19 – PM parent/teacher/student conferences  4:30 – 8:00 (bookings open March 12 at 5:00 pm)

  
  

  Mar. 20 - parent/teacher/student conferences  8:00 – 12:00 No school for students

  
  

  Mar. 21 – Mar. 29 – Spring Break

  
  

  Monday, Mar. 30 – School Back in

Learning Highlights:

• This week we had our celebration of Learning! It was a lot of fun to show off what we knew about heat and temperature, and its impact on life in the arctic. 
• We have been researching about problems in the arctic. These problems include:

These are the solutions that we came up with:

Which solution do you think is the best? And, why?

We also showcased the experiments that we did for learning about heat and temperature. 

What is heat transfer?

What did you feel?

Did the temperature change?

What is heat conduction?

What materials are the best at conducting heat?

We got to share our finished art which was inspired by the aurora borealis 

...and our soapstone carvings -this art was inspired by Inuksuk:

here is a ice structure inspired by an Inuksuk.

 ... and our watercolor paintings of arctic animals:

• For writing we practiced descriptive sentences for our Arctic stories. 
• For math we were working on subtraction and fact families. We played math "Splat" to help us build our understanding of fact families: 

 

this helped us to see that 10 - 2 = 8, AND 10 - 8 = 2 ....also, 2 + 8 = 10 and 8 + 2 = 10

Here are some other math games we played to practice our fact fluency:

• Doubles and Near Doubles: playfactile.com/gr2doublesfacts   
• For more practice with stacking addition, try this: https://jeopardylabs.com/play/2nd-grade90   

Message from ROS: Lost and Found

Dear Parents,

We want to remind students and parents that the Lost and Found is located in the vestibule and can be accessed anytime during the school day.

Lost and Found items will be put out on display in the gathering space during school conferences on Thursday, March 19 at 1:00 p.m. and will remain on display until 12:00 p.m. on Friday, March 20.  All items that are clearly labeled, will be returned to students prior to being put on display.  We encourage all families to have a look at these items during this time. 

 All lost and found items not picked up by 12:00 noon on Friday, March 20 will be donated to charity.

Sincerely,

Royal Oak School

Message From Ms. Hennick:

ROS Students are currently participating in a ‘Circus’ unit in PE class. We are learning a variety of new tricks using various equipment such as juggling sticks, scarves, hula hoops, spinning plates, diablos, tossing rings and juggling clubs. Students are encouraged to check out the Youtube channel, the National Circus Project. Below is a list of videos that students can watch to inspire them to try new tricks while in the gym. We are very excited about this unit! Thanks for your support! 

 https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCxndbKEHt9i5mELqNLrx33Q 

***Beginner videos are a great starting point*** 

Devil Sticks (juggling sticks) 

Scarf Juggling 

Hoops 

Plates 

Diablo