Mrs. Sampson's Spectacular Students

December 9 - 13 ELAL Students enhance the accuracy and artistry of expression through creative and critical thinking processes. Establish a plot, point of view, setting, and problem through creative writing. What Did Students Do?: On Monday and Tuesday, students were given a pre-assessment for narrative writing. Using a picture prompt they wrote a story about the picture. This gave us, as teachers the opportunity to see where our students are at with their writing and what next steps we need to take to further their skills in narrative writing. On Wednesday students examined the elements of a narrative story: beginning, middle, end, problem, solution, character, and setting. Students used graphic organizers to examine the parts of their own story. They then looked at non-examples of written stories and identified the parts that were weak or missing. Students finished the week by annotating the parts in an example of a well written story using different colours for each part.  ...

December 2 - 6  Math Students multiply natural numbers within  100 000,  including standard algorithms. What did students do? This week, students continued working on multiplication. Students have previously been building their fact fluency of their basic multiplication facts. We looked closely at multiplication and looked at different ways of representing problems. Students have focused on 0, 1, 2, and 5 basic fact families.  Students have also begun to work with learning about and using a variety of algorithms to find products. Students demonstrated their understanding of using the traditional stacked method to multiply 2- by -1 digit multiplication equations and 2 by 2 digit multiplication equations. Students also learned how to use the lattice method to multiply. Students learned how it works and used it as a strategy to work through 2-by-1 digit and 2-by-2 digit multiplication equations. Ask your child to tell you more about this algorithm.  Students also h...