Don’t forget there is a 2:00pm Dismissal on Thursday Nov 18th. If this will create a hardship for your family, please let me know through the school office at 604-713-4605.
Portfolio meetings start on November 23! This is a wonderful time to celebrate our learning journey at school and at home! Please phone to school office from outside the building when you arrive with your child and I will come down to meet you at the front doors. I wont be able to sanitize classroom materials between meetings, so please bring something quiet to engage siblings while they wait their turn.
Portfolio Week Projects: Because students will be missing several days of in person learning from November 23 through December 2, I am offering up an Interdisciplinary project for those who would like to supplement these extra days at home and to get a head start on work we will do in future weeks. It is on the theme of Snails. I do have a few more snails for students who attend on Thursday/Friday this week. Please read the blog from last week for details. The children in attendance on Tuesday Nov 16 received a copy, and I will provide it to those in attendance on Thursday Nov 18th. I will place additional copies in the “Extra Copies for Parents” Envelope as well.
Over the past week we have been discussing helpful ways to organize our thinking, how to plan our work and how to keep track of work and important dates etc. (This is part of Career Education area in SLPs) Generally VSB students from Grade 2 and up start learning how to use a Day Planner as part of daily routines. I have suggested that one strategy might be for students (especially Intermediates) to ask parents for a simple Academic Day Planner (these go through the school year from August to July rather than 12 month January to December style) to help them become more independent in this area. (They are very cheap at this time of the year. I’ve recently seen them at “dollar stores” or they could be homemade.)
Experiential Learning is the mainstay of Home Learners programs. Experiential Learning is Learning through experience AND reflection on the doing. With that in mind, we have been working to deepen our abilities to Reflect after our Hands On/ Experiential activities. Rather than simply ‘launch in and see where it goes” with our writing, we have been thinking about making connections and creating logical sequences. Currently we are using Fiber Art and Science as the topic for this writing. Procedural Writing and writing about science trains the writer to bring clarity to complexity. For the older students we push this further to notice how this sort of writing about science helps us embrace nuance and come to appreciate that that everything “new” is built upon past relationships. Ask you children about “First, Next, Then, Finally” templates that were sent home with the Primary students this week.
We have also been learning about Reflecting on our work and how to do “Self-Evaluations. Our regular “Shape of the Day” routine involves reflecting on our Social Emotional Learning (SEL) state. Recently we have been extending that reflecting on our academic work as well. We have been exploring various ways of measuring our effort and using a variety of “4 point scales”. I am continually impressed with the depth and quality of thinking that your children share with each other!