Hello Parents, 

This quick post is to let you know that our final Scholastic Book Order before the holiday season will be sent out this week. It will be a quick turn-around so that I can make a rush order and the forms and cash will be due on Friday, November 28, 2014 by 2:30 pm.

Please send CASH ONLY for this order so that it can be shipped immediately upon submission of the online order. Scholastic waits until they receive the cheques in the mail before shipping the whole order back out to us. By sending cash, we are ensuring a faster delivery time for our books, meaning they should arrive before the holiday season is upon us! 

If the books ordered are intended as a gift for your child, please indicate this on the order form or with a quick note in the envelope/baggie that you send in. You can also drop orders off at the office for Mrs. Swerdan to leave in my mailbox. I will arrange for you to pick up the order upon its arrival so that your child doesn't know. :) 

Thank you for your continued support for our Book Club. We will be doing some more classroom shopping in January so look for a post to see what we've bought with our Bonus Bucks! If you have any questions, please email me or comment below. Thanks!

-Ms. Olson

Division 5 has been a hub of learning activity over the past few weeks. I apologize for being far behind on sharing photos. Please peruse our photo galleries below for the latest and greatest of what's been going on. 

Included galleries are: 

• Pumpkins with Little Buddies
• Paper Blogging
• Write-On, Wipe-Off Math
• A Visit from the Mobile Dairy Lab
• Mystery Location Skype with Kyle

This year we are little buddies with Mrs. Alsop's Kindergarten class. These photos are from our first time meeting them in October. We made pumpkins for Halloween.

Paper blogging helps us to learn about blogging and commenting in the safe and closed environment of our classroom. We learned about 3 different kinds of comments: Dead-end comments, Side-street comments, and Highway comments. We are working on commenting on others' written work in a thoughtful and meaningful way so positive conversations can be had about the work.

Math activities are easy to reproduce when photocopies do not have to be made. Here students are working with write-on, wipe-off page protectors and dice to explore mathematical concepts like multiplication and addition. With partners, they can use any tools of their choice to solve the problems.

The Mobile Dairy Lab visited our school this week and we got to learn all about cows, how they produce milk, and where that milk goes to make our favourite dairy foods like cheese and ice cream!

Kyle, one of our students, has been away this week but kept his whereabouts generally secret from the class. After exploring some mapping terminologies and sharing them on our Twitter page, we worked on developing a set of yes or no questions that we could ask Kyle to pinpoint his location. Students used Google Earth, atlases, and maps and used Kyle's answers to determine that he and his family were in Molokai, Hawaii, USA! The gallery of our 20 minute call is below. 

Thanks for taking the time to check out our photo galleries. Please comment below if you have any favourites! 

-Ms. Olson

Dear Parents of Division 5:

This year your child's math program will include a self-regulated problem solving and games component. Key math concepts will be repeated and practiced through exciting and fun games with the use of manipulatives being an important part of the program. 

We are asking families to donate any of the following equipment that we may be able to use in our classroom this year:

• Playing cards (decks do not have to be complete)
• Small stopwatches or egg timers

The rest of the equipment we require will be covered by either the school or our generously allocated classroom PAC fund. 

Your contribution to our classroom is greatly appreciated. We look forward to your child teaching you some of our math games and problem solving strategies very soon!

-Ms. Olson