December "Craftivities"

December was a very busy month with lots going on. Our Gr. 5/6 Volleyball team were champions. Yahoo! Congrats to Brayden on winning MVP! We had Christmas concert, spirit assembly, movie night, craft with the Timmins Native Friendship Center and we worked very hard on a few projects!


First Nations & European Explorer Journals:

This project had us putting ourselves in the shoes of people who lived a long time ago! After learning about the first explorers to North America and the impact they had on the First Nations living there at the time, we wrote journal entries pretending to be either an explorer, or a crew member, or a First Nations person meeting the explorers. We had to write three entires, all in the style of narrative recount, with historical fact to it. We had to accurately date our entires and talk about the positive and negative consequences to the meetings. Then to add some authenticity, we distressed our work by crumbling it up (the boys seemed to really enjoy this part!) and then staining it with tea bags. The end result was papers that looked hundreds of years old. Everyone enjoyed writing their journals and there were some impressive pieces of writing! Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures :(

Problem Presents and Comprehension Snowmen Craftivity:

A panoramic of all the snowmen and presents 

This project had us answering comprehension questions about a book we read for Social Studies called, "Encounter". It is written from the perspective of a young Tanino boy about the first landing on Christopher Columbus in the Caribbean. It gave us a very different story and really got us thinking. We answered six questions to show our comprehension of the book and wrote them on six snowmen. We glued the snowmen together to create a cool 3D snowman.

For the problem presents, we answered three different math problems related to our unit on data management. We found the mean of two different set of data and worked with input and output tables as well. The structure of the presents made us think about our thinking and the end result were some well thought out responses. A job well done by everyone!

On the last day of school we celebrated our hard work by sharing our work with our classmates. We shared the part we were most proud of and the part we found the most difficult. Then we had some homemade sugar cookies and homemade hot cocoa. What an excellent end to 2013!

From my family to yours, have a safe, healthy and fun Christmas! 

Merry Christmas,
Mrs. Reid