Hello families, 

I would like to extend a warm welcome to another student in our classroom, Matthew! Please make sure you say hello to him and his family if you see them around the school. We are so excited to have them here at West Langley! 

Division 5 has been busy this month with everything from our continued skating field trips, to Genius Hour, to learning with Ms. Ledlin (our student teacher), and much, much more! As the school year is creeping to a close, Ms. Olson would like to let you know more about the project and our presentation times.

About Genius Hour

Genius Hour gives students an hour each week on Thursday afternoons to learn about a topic that they are passionate or curious about. Each project idea was thought of and designed by the student, approved by the teacher, and must be based upon their individual research. Please note that this project is oriented on the documentation of the student's progress, not the final product! In many cases, students won't actually be able to accomplish their final goals by June, but should be able to document their learning along the way.

Several students are building projects (creating board games, stop-motion animation props, robots, etc.), whereas others are creating theirs digitally (making websites, filming stop-motion animation, learning to code, etc.). Please discuss the next steps of this project with your child and what they would like to accomplish by the end of the year. Their work so far can be found in their Google Drive folders. 

Genius Hour Sharing Events

Students will have 2 opportunities to present their findings from their topics and central questions this year.  The first will be at the end of May at the Inquiry Fair and the second will be the final presentation to the class in the middle of June. While that might still seem very far away, it's actually time to start considering what we need to accomplish before then!

Final presentations in June must have a digital component involved so that it can be shared on student blogs. Students are allowed to use any presentation or video software they like to present their learning journey. In class, we will be discussing which presentation tools will most effectively demonstrate their learning and I will guide them to one that will work best for them. Chances are that no matter which tool they end up selecting, there will need to be a lot of photo documentation of their project as possible, so please take lots of photos if they are working on this at home!

Photo Fun!

See the photos below to see some EduMinions learning magic (in no particular order at all; we have been very behind with our sharing!)

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

This week, the EduMinions had a great week between Halloween activities, our first Mystery Number Skype, solving patterning problems, and painting our mini-pumpkins as Minions!

We'd like to thank Save-On Foods Walnut Grove for their generous donation of 25 mini pumpkins to our classroom.  

The students have begun to draft their first blog posts on what it takes to be a positive digital citizen. If you would like to complete the DRAFT COPY at home (leave it unedited please - we are covering editing skills on Monday), you can log-in to our Kidblog site here. 

Here are some quick snaps (sorry some of them are blurry!) of our web-building for Chapter 5 of Marty McGuire as well as Friday's Mystery Skype.

Quick reminder that if you haven't filled out the "Help Us Get To Know Your Child" survey online, please do so here ---> http://goo.gl/jVDbmX

One of the highlights of this week was when Division 5 got to participate in their very first Mystery Skype. During this activity, we connect via Skype with another classroom somewhere in the world without knowing where in the world they are. Using tools like atlases, maps, iPad apps like Google Maps and Google Earth, and National Geographic, we play 20 questions with the other class to identify where they are calling from.  This week, the class we connected with was from Valley Center, Kansas, USA. 

Here are some photos of our experiences this week at school:

Have a great weekend!