Ms. Davis Grade 5 (2023-2024)

Hello families! This week was a busy, eventful one for us. In math, we continued practicing order of operations, and I checked in with students with a quick order of operations quiz. Students learned about the distributive property when multiplying a number outside of brackets, as well as solved questions with nested brackets. Students were challenged with solving expressions that contained exponents. We will be finished our order of operations unit next week with a few group activities and a final unit test. In science, students finished their burglar alarm project and presented their circuits to the class. Next week we will begin exploring magnetism. In social studies, students began researching about life in New France, finding out what daily life was like for settlers, what food they ate and how they gathered it, what food Europeans introduced to Canada, and how different epidemic diseases impacted the First Nations peoples. In ELAL, students finished their free verse poems and sha...

Happy Friday everyone. This week, students began their new math unit on the Order of Operations. They learned about which operations are solved first in an expression, using the acronym BDMAS (Brackets, division/multiplication left to right, addition/subtraction left to right). Students also learned briefly about exponents, which come after brackets, but this will be focused on in later grades more thoroughly.  In ELAL, students began writing their first free verse poem. We brainstormed topics and decided on dream countries to visit. Students then chose a country and brainstormed all the words they could think up that described their country. From there, they used descriptive language and imagery to describe each word. Students will be presenting their poems to the class next week, then moving on to create haikus. In Science, students began to build their burglar alarms, bringing their circuit designs to life. Students learned about early explorers to Canada in Social Studies, such...

Happy Friday! This week, students finished their Math measurement unit with two activities. Using an online geoboard, students created a design for a garden, where each garden plot had a maximum perimeter of 22 units. Later in the week, students used linking cubes to determine a variety of different rectangular floor plans that had an area of 24 units². They finished the week with a measurement, unit and perimeter test. In Science, students began planning their burglar alarm circuits. Their final plans will be approved by me, and then they will be constructing their burglar alarms using class materials.  Students had the exciting opportunity to listen to a Blackfoot storyteller this week, hearing the story of Napi and the Rock from Mr. Scout. They learned about pictographs and the different ways the Blackfoot people used parts of the buffalo. We continued this learning in class, where students drew a pictograph, summarizing Napi and the Rock. Next week, students will continue to ex...

Good afternoon families! This week, students continued work on our measurement unit. They learned about referents, and came up with different referents for various measurements (for example, 1 cm is close to the width of a finger nail). They completed a measurement quiz, where they had to provide referents for different measurements, and convert between millimetres, centimeters, decimeters and meters. We finished the week up by calculating the perimeter and area of rectangles. Students created a Morpheme Lexicon in ELAL, where they will be documenting all their learning around morphology. This week we learned about the morpheme -s, -es, -ys and -ies. We also began our poetry unit today with a poetry "tasting", where students explored seven different poems. In partners, students went around and wrote down what poetic techniques the poems used, the poems meaning, and any images, descriptions or vocabulary that were interesting. We also began our next read aloud, "A Rover...