Teacher Pages

Grade 5 / 6 September Newsletter Welcome to Grade Five and Six! For those of you who are new to our school or community welcome to Ft. Assiniboine! We are Mrs. Deb Breitkreitz and Mrs. Charlene Assenheimer. Together with you, we will be working diligently to help your child have a wonderful year inspiring curiosity, fun and learning! To help make things flow smoothly and keep you informed about what we are doing in the classroom you will receive a newsletter by the first Friday of each month. The newsletter will inform you of activities, schedules and the big rocks or objectives of our teaching instruction. House keeping items have been added this month to make you aware of expectations and several programs available to your child. Student Expectations – We expect all students to learn, grow and positively contribute to our class environment and school. To achieve this goal each student needs to be respectful and willing to work. Three general simple rules capture the main idea here; 1. Take care of yourself, 2. Take care of each other and 3. Take care of this place. School Planners- Each student at our school has been given a planner to use as a communication and organizational tool. Students are learning to be responsible by bringing the planner back and forth from home to school and back each day. Please ask to look at and sign your child’s planner each night even if nothing new appears to be written in it. Also include any comments or questions that you have as this is your communication tool too! Your child will be rewarded for following directions and bringing back their planner. Milk- Milk is available through the school for $0.75 a carton. Chocolate / white milk will be brought to our classroom by each day around 12:00. Money can be sent each day or a milk card can be purchased for $7.50 (ten milk). This program will start around September 9th. Canteen – On Fridays, elementary students will be given the opportunity to visit the school canteen to make special purchases for their lunch. Items range from cup of soup, and sandwiches to popcorn and juice. Prices range from .50 cents to $3.00. A price list with items will be sent home at a later date. Microwave- One microwave is available for heating up lunch items in the classroom. Although we have a relatively small class, heating up fifteen items every day can be a very time consuming task. We ask that you please send precooked items for microwave rather than microwavable KD or frozen soups or meals that take longer than a minute. This is to ensure that your child has enough time to eat before they go out to play. Absences- Please let us know if your child will be absent from school for any reason, by either sending a note ahead of time or phoning the school at 584-3751. Our school secretary, Mrs. Fleming would greatly appreciate hearing from you. In the event that your child is absent, the work they missed will be sent home and a date will be established for its completion and return. Homework- Each night your child will be asked to read for 15 minutes to reinforce the instruction they have received in school. They will also be asked to review spelling / vocabulary words and basic facts that are being learned. As the year progresses your child may on occasion take home other work they did not complete in school. A note or explanation will generally be written in the day planner. Please ensure that this work is completed that night and returned the next day. Incentive Plans- As classroom rules, routines and procedures are shared, we will be promoting a new economy incentive plan in the Gr. 5/6 room. Briefly the incentive plan will reflect our society’s economy. Working hard, following rules, performing well, and doing good deeds the students will earn money. Negative behaviour will lead to fines or penalties. On a weekly basis we will have ‘Bankers’ help balance class books while each individual student will have a cheque book to balance. Each month students will have the opportunity to shop at our classroom ‘store’ using the money they have earned. In addition we will have an auction three times a year. We are very excited about the incentive plan and believe students will gain valuable life skills from the program. Curriculum Focus- Each month we will provide you with a brief outline of the major objectives or big rocks for the core subject areas. This month’s big rocks are: LA –We will begin by reviewing some good reader strategies starting with setting a purpose for reading, selecting books from a variety of genres and exploring how the elements of a story help to improve our comprehension. In Writing, we will take these elements and use them to focus our ideas to make our writing unique while still making sense to the reader. We will be using picture books to model these strategies and students will have a picture book project to complete this month. Math – We will begin the year reviewing basic facts and examining them for Patterns and Relationships. This will lay the foundation for problem solving and critical thinking which will be a focus throughout the year. Science – Asking questions is an essential skill in every subject. To encourage questions and sparking curiosity in science we will focus on Sky Science, examining the movement of the planets and stars in our galaxy. One of the main objectives will be to help the children understand the importance of the sun and moon for our planet. Social- We will begin with some basic mapping skills and will also focus on the geographical location of provinces and capital cities in Canada. Our main focus this year is on the history and geography of Canada so we will be exploring what it means to be a Canadian. If you have any information, artifacts are interesting topics regarding Canada that you would like to share with the class please let me know and we will be happy to make time for you. In addition we will also explore current event issues. Each month we will have 4 or 5 current event topics to explore and students will submit a current events package that will be worth 10% of the social studies mark. As we progress through the year we will alternate between Gr. 5 and Gr. 6 topics of study in Science and Social. Math and Language Art instruction are tiered so that both Gr. 5 and 6 objectives will be covered simultaneously. Remedial instruction and enrichment for students will be provided as needed on a daily basis. This is part of our daily assessment work, which we will send more information out about in the future. Please feel free to contact us with any questions, concerns or compliments either by dropping us a note in your child’s planner or giving us a call at the school, 584-3751. We look forward to seeing and hearing from you soon! Our door is always open! Until next month . . . take care because we care! Mrs. Deb Breitkreitz Mrs. Charlene Assenheimer