Hello everyone! This week, our focus has heavily been on setting daily goals on what kind of learner we want to be and how we can achieve that. Students are really improving on deepening their reflections on their own learning and actions. I have also been having 1 on 1 meetings with each student reflecting on how grade 5 has been so far and how the students want it to be moving on. This is making them be more intentional about how they learn and act in school.

This week students compared the highland and lowlands of Japan by performing a puppet show, a skit, and a slideshow presentation. This was directly related to the 3rd line of inquiry, what are the different topographical features of Japan. I was able to see an increase on their research abilities using books, videos and articles. Students are getting better at being able to paraphrase and summarise what they have researched. All of their presentations were very creative and entertaining.

For English this week, students wrote their own creative writing pieces and used the rubric to reflect on how they think they did. We then compared this with the teachers feedback and talked about whether they agreed with the teacher, what they were surprised about, and what they can work on. We also started a new system using RAZ books to help students increase their reading skills. First, we assessed each students RAZ reading levels. Students then took home a book from their current level to practice reading at home and will do a writing task as well. We are excited to see students reading skills grow!

This week for Maths, we practiced adding fractions using the rectangle fraction model. It was another tool for students to use when doing fraction calculations.

We have made amazing progress for the PYP exhibition. Students have decided on their transdisciplinary theme, central idea and their lines of inquiry. It is thrilling to see what actions students would like to take for their exhibitions!

We had some visitors from the grade 1 students as they were explaining to us how they are collecting data about food waste from each student. They are working hard to reduce food waste in the school.

We have some exciting events coming up for grade 5. We have the bus trip on the October 5th going ice skating, the Minami campus Halloween party on October 27th and our Halloween party on the 31st of October! I hope everyone is excited! See you next week.