IPC Powerpoint Presentations

As our exit point (conclusion activity) for our IPC unit Explorers & Adventurers, the students each made a Powerpoint slideshow.  Their slides contained information regarding the different sections of our unit, from maps to geography to searching for new routes to exploring upper north america and everything in between.  They have taken this information and put it into a setting where they could explore their creativity, and learn a new presentation technique technologically based.  Today, we invited parents in to share in our learning and help us celebrate the conclusion of this unit.  I was absolutely thrilled to see how many of our parents and family members were able to come to school and participate in this celebration with us.  Thank you parents and family members for being able to take time out of your day to do this for us.  Also, thank you for ensuring that every child in our classroom got to share in their success.  I'm so very pleased to be part of a fabulous classroom community.

Superhero Day

Superhero's have descended upon ISG today.  From Superwoman to The Flash to Batgirl to a doctor (his father is his superhero), our room as definitely protected from all dangers today. ;)

80s Day

There was a whole lot of neon entering the classroom today for 80s Day.  Super proud of all the students who are getting involved in our spirit days this week.  Especially one student who brought a boombox / ghetto blaster; really brought me back to the days of my youth. ;)

Twin Day

Spirit week is this week with yesterday starting us off on Pajama Day and today being Twin Day.  We had multiple sets of twins, and some triplets, show up at school.  It was hard to tell who was who ;)  I'm looking forward to seeing what 80s Day brings tomorrow.

Blogging with K Buddies

In one of our final buddy activities, the students got together and wrote on the 4th grade students Kidblogs.  Reflecting on all that they've done together, the students took turns writing about what they enjoyed doing together.  It was a great reflection tool and it was fun to see the students working collaboratively to create a written piece together.  You can find our writing on the link below:

Blogging with K Buddies

IPC Integration

This morning's language arts pods found students integrating their IPC topic: Explorers and Adventurers, with various language arts tasks.  While we still did our pods with technology (Into the Book) and continuing to work on our novel study final project, the students also did a read and respond activity where they read a nonfiction card about early exploration while the teacher led pod worked on eliciting information from an article we read yesterday, Ancient Adventurers.  I was extremely pleased with the amount of focus and on task work the students showed this morning.

Exit Point Powerpoints

As we work through our IPC unit on Explorers and Adventurers, the students will be collecting data to use for their exit point activity.  At the end of every unit, students partake in an activity to conclude the unit which is what we refer to as the exit point.  For this current unit, students are creating a powerpoint.  They'll use data in the various categories pertaining to this unit for each slide, and then will present these powerpoints at the end of the unit.

Guest Speaker

Our current IPC unit on Explorers and Adventurers has students learning many things about geography and maps.  Yesterday, a member of our school community came and spoke to us about maps and cartography, aspects of maps, the various kinds and how he uses them in his job as a cruise ship captain.  It was extremely informative and we learned that electronic maps have many great features that keep passengers safe while travelling.

Is a Square a Rectangle?

We started another mini geometry unit today: square and rectangles.

First, we investigated characteristics of square and rectangles.  We decided:

Rectangles

• have four 90° angles
• opposite sides are the same length
• opposite sides are parallel

Squares

• have four 90° angles
• all four sides are the same length
• opposite sides are parallel (from which we deduced that the lines must be straight)
• is a rectangle

This last feature about squares brought this question forth:

The students discussed this and came up with some very valid answers.  They should good critical thinking skills and through debate and discussion were able to decipher that this statement is true and why it is so.

Villa Gentile

On Monday the students headed to Villa Gentile for a day of Salty Cats.  While the weather wasn't the greatest, it did allow us to participate in many events this morning - from relays, to sprints, to shot put, to sack races, to javelin and more!  We had a fabulous time and even managed to make it back before the rain, and hail!, came pouring down.

Using Tools to Make Perpendicular Lines

Yesterday students learned about parallel and perpendicular lines, and how to draw them.  The tool we chose to start with was a triangular ruler, that has a 90° angle incorporated in its structure.  This led us to today's goal:

With a bag of different measuring tools in front of them, students first choose the one we know and demonstrated how to use it to create perpendicular lines.  Then, from the remaining tools left on their desks they needed to choose on that they thought they could use to create perpendicular lines.

After some discussion, and trying out one tool which we deemed would not work to accurately create a perpendicular line, they decided that we could use a protractor to help us in this endeavour.  Through a class demonstration, the students agreed that indeed this would work.  So then we set out to practice creating perpendicular lines alternating between the two measuring tools.

Making Lines

Using triangle rulers, students practiced making parallel and perpendicular lines today.  It's nice to start with graph paper to help ensure that our lines are straight and that we do create 90° angles.  When we leave the graph paper, our triangle rulers will definitely help as will using a protractor.  It's amazing how previous unit concepts return to be applied again. ;)

Parallel and Perpendicular Lines

Our next mini geometry unit is about lines; parallel and perpendicular lines to be exact.  Today students first explored concepts and shared what they observed about two separate images of lines.  From doing so and our class discussion, we discovered the properties of parallel and perpendicular lines.  Also, we found that moving the turning or rotating the image did not change the properties of the lines.

Parallel Lines
1. Made by two straight lines / line segments
2. The lines never meet.
3. The distance between the lines remains the same at all points.

Perpendicular Lines
1.  Made by two straight lines / lines segments
2.  The lines meet.
3.  Where the lines meet creates a 90° angle.

After we explored this visually and through discussion, the students then used strips of paper to create parallel and perpendicular lines.  We found that using measurement tools (ie rulers and right triangle rulers) helps to ensure accuracy of our lines.

Shared Writing

The students are working on their last large writing project of the year: an expository essay on an endangered animal.  They have been hard at work doing research for their paper, and some of us have even finished.  As we all start to get closer to the next step, it means that we'll begin drafting.  To start our papers, we plan on writing an introductory paragraph.  This can often be a hard, wordy task and one which I like to model first for the students (do an example for / with them first).  Today we did just that and then the students participated in shared writing with a partner or small group to write an introductory paragraph together to get our papers started.  It was GREAT to see the collaboration between the students.

IPC Cartography

Learning concepts through reading non fiction and fictional literature is an important skill students need to build on in school.  In IPC we do a lot of reading about our key learning ideas through non fiction articles and books.  Today we read about cartography and various map skills through reading Mapping the Woods which speaks from a child's point of view, and is fun to read.