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Whats happening in

Gill-Ville Jr. Area Comp . November 2011

http://teachers.wrdsb.ca/GILLK

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Mark your Calendars

Horseback Riding
Tues Nov. 1st, 8th, & 15th

Character Education:
During the month of October, our focus was on the SPEAK WITH GOOD PURPOSE key, which means to use kind words and have good intentions when communicating with or about others and ourselves. Our Student of the Month winner, by a class vote, is Jacob, who has been working hard to be positive and speak with good purpose. During the month of November, we will be spending time talking about the INTEGRITY key. Students learn that its important to do the right thing. When you know what is right and your actions match, you are showing integrity.

Horseback Riding:

Family Literacy Night

Thursday, Nov. 3 6:00 7:30

rd

Photo Retake Day Monday, Nov. 7th

R.M.i Lunch Days

Wed, Nov. 9th & 23rd Remembrance Day Assembly Friday, Nov. 11th Reports Go Home Monday, Nov. 14th Parent Teacher Conferences Thursday Nov. 17th & Friday Nov. 18th Gateway Cooking Monday, Nov. 21st Outdoor Ed. Trip Tuesday, Nov. 22nd
School Spirit Day: Peaceful Hippie Day

We will finish up our weekly horseback riding sessions at Pride Stables this month. Our last lesson takes place on Tuesday, November 15th. Weve really been enjoying our time with the horses. Check out all of our public pictures on our class flickr site! Sign in to your account and become our friend to see the private pictures that show faces.
http://www.flickr.com/photos /gill-villeans

Progress Reports:
You will receive an Alternative Progress Report Card that will have information about your childs literacy, numeracy, and learning skills progress so far this year. Any questions you may have about the report card can be answered during your parent-teacher conference scheduled Thursday evening (Nov. 17th) or Friday daytime (Nov. 18th). If you are unable to make your scheduled time, please contact us via planner, phone or email to arrange another time.

Homework:

Friday, Nov. 25th

Please read instructions on the weekly checklist carefully. Well be sending home special instructions near the end of the month for a special science project! Stay tuned!

Upcoming Trips:
We will continue with our weekly horseback riding and grocery store shopping trips as usual. Our Little Chefs cooking lesson with Chef Dana is scheduled on Monday, November 21st. We hope you enjoyed your chicken parmigiana that we made in October. Remember that we take lots of pictures on our trips and post them for you to see on our class flickr site. On Tuesday, November 22nd we are going to the Blair Outdoor Education Centre for an orienteering program. We are excited to use iPods for some of the activities during our session. Please sign and return the consent form by Thursday, November 17th.

What We Are Learning:

Global Read Aloud : We really enjoyed participating in this project again this year. We were thrilled to have 3 successful video chats using Adobe Connect. We were able to meet with Mrs. Burmeisters class in Wisconsin, Mrs. MacDonalds class in Vermont, and we finished reading the last chapter online locally with Mr. OConnors class in Waterloo! Although the Global Read Aloud Project is officially over for this year, we are still working on some extension activities with the story, Tuck Everlasting. Each of the students have written various blog posts about our experiences and learning. Check out the students Adobe Connect posts to read about student thoughts on our video conference book chats and read their different Character Study posts to see work students created related to their investigation of specific characters from the story. Students created word clouds using the iPod touch app Word Clouder. They also used the online desktop application voki to make talking avatars. We also made plasticine figures that we later used with the I Can Animate iPad app to produce short stop motion animation videos. Visit our blogs and leave a comment! http://kidblog.org/Gill-Ville http://blogs.wrdsb.ca/gillk

Family Technology Day in Gill-Ville:

Id like to take a moment to thank all of the families for coming out to our Family Technology Day on October 5th. I am thrilled that we had the opportunity to show off our learning tools and include our families in our online activities. If you have questions or need support with any of our sharing sites, please let us know. We are all learning this together!

We are really enjoying our Quadblogging partnership. It has been wonderful getting 14-20 comments on our posts when we are used to getting somewhere between 1-8 due to our small class size. We are learning so much from each other. Its neat to compare what others are learning around the world. Our class will have our next turn being the showcase blog during the week of November 7th -11th. You can also participate at home and read the posts of the blogs of our partners as well! Visit our class website to find the links for the blogs or our quadblogging friends. Find them in the Blog Role section of the site.

The Global Childrens Challenge will be wrapping up on November 4th. We have been enjoying recording our pedometer count each day and learning of new ways to be active. During the challenge our class has ranged anywhere between 1500-2100 position in the leaderboard scores. We will continue with our own challenge within our classroom once the global project is over and use the data for projects in math and gym activities.

Nutrition Tracking:

Identity Day:
Ryersons first Identity Day was a huge success! Each student in Gill-Ville shared their passions within our classroom and invited others in to learn more about us as well as travel around to learn more about other students in the school. We learned that three of our students have a passion for their pet dogs and two students have a passion for similar sports such as karate and kickboxing. You can read more about the event on our class blog post: http://blogs.wrdsb.ca/gillk/2011 /10/24/identity-day/

Starting in November, students will begin to record their daily food intake at school. Well be looking at balanced meals and sorting food into the four main food groups. Students will be developing a greater awareness of healthy eating practices and setting nutrition goals.

We are beginning to use Edmodo, another social networking site designed specifically for schools. Edmodo looks and functions, in many ways, like Facebook but is only open to educators. Teachers set up an account, which is then verified, and then students join with a code provided by their teacher. Our class is involved in groups within this site. We have a class group and each student has created their personal profile page with cartoon avatar and is earning badges for the work and contributions they are making. Students are writing and tagging learning journal posts in this group at least once each week, which will create an on-going record of their learning over the course of the school year. We also used Edmodo to connect with classes involved in the Global Read Aloud Project but the group is now closed due to the project completion. We will be using Edmodo to connect with classes participating in our traveling mascot program as well as other projects that come up throughout the year. Parents can have access to Edmodo as well. If you wish to check in on this site, please request a parent access code from us by writing a note in your childs planner. Well send your individual code to you with instructions on how to log in and look around.

Gill the Goldfish Traveling Mascot Program Returns:

During the month of November we will become reacquainted with our four traveling fish. Well be checking in with Lil Gill who is on a cross-Canada adventure and use QR codes to explore the various destinations on his trip. We will also go on a fact-finding mission to check in with G2 who is a mystery location somewhere in the world. Our two remaining fish friends, Gill and Lil G are also about to embark on new adventures as they take off to visit our quadblogging partners in Florida and the UK. You can check in on all of our fish friends by visiting the project wiki and clicking on the various sidebar links showing the different classes participating and the trips that are occurring. http://gillthegoldfishgoesglobal. wikispaces.com We will also resume writing on the Teddy Bears Around the World blog and share Gills adventures there. We will also be reading blogs from other teddy bears and leaving comments for other students participating in this project. You can read our posts and comments by visiting the Teddy Bears blog site:
http://www.langwitches.org/blog /travel/teddybearsaroundtheworld