Guest Facilitators and Making Connections

On Tuesday we began our latest unit in Religion:  Prayer.  Our first learning goal is to come up with a class definition of prayer.  Our warm-up activity was to brainstorm in groups the answers to these questions:
     What is prayer? 
Where do we pray?

Who taught us to pray?

On Wednesday we had guest facilitators who led the discussion.  The task was to find the common aspects from each group's work that would become elements in our definition.  Thank you to Brendan, Carlo, and Fletcher we volunteered to do some "practice teaching".

We continue to work on extending our understanding of the text by making connections.  Last week we tried our first independent reader's response, after working together on making many connections, but with much difficulty.  As a result this week, we worked in groups after I read the mentor text "Wilfrid Gordon McDonald Partridge" by Mem Fox to the class.  Pictured below is the class working collaboratively.  Please continue to encourage them to make connections (not retell their schema) while reading at home nightly.  We have used a variety of strategies from graphic organizers, to using sticky notes to flag areas of the text that can be used to make connections, to using a connections book mark to prompt them while reading/listening to a text.

Did you know that we will have a math test on Tuesday?  Please note that it is related to the unit 2 work we have been doing.  Use the anchor charts for unit 2 as a guide.  For studying purposes, you can do practice questions from the textbook since we have never done all of the suggested questions for each lesson and ensure that all errors in your workbook and orange duo tang are corrected.  Also, please note that for grade six, we only have to understand numbers to the millions (7 digits) and not larger as our textbook suggests. Finally, you must have mastered all the steps of problem solving for this test! Happy studying!