Mr. Henderson's Wolverine Den: Week in Review: May 1

Welcome to the month of May, wow April was a blur - most have been all the fantastic weather?! It is hard to believe that there are only eight weeks of school left in the year! Luckily for us, this May there is more than enough time to pack in a novel study, a few unit tests, a family dance, some bake sales, and of course some Mothers Day fun.

The last few weeks are busy and will certainly fly by so it's important that everyone is here and on time so that they do not miss out on any of the fun!

In terms of curriculum this week...

In Math we've kicked off our study of measuring liquids and using millilitres, litres, and kilolitres and shifted away from the measuring of distance. With the lessons the kids will be learning about accurately measuring and converting units of liquid measurement. Watch for a practice booklet on linear and capacity measurement to come home next week.

In Language Arts this week we continue to develop our reading comprehension skills and the ability to locate and identify features of good stories. Our current novel study, Fantastic Mr. Fox is moving along nicely and the students are consistently generating chapter summaries and completing chapter assignments which always them to synthesize their information and highlight the main features that they deem to be most important to understanding the individual chapters.

With our novel study we are hoping to wrap up this novel before the May long weekend and celebrate our reading with a text-movie comparison using the stop-motion movie version of Fantastic Mr. Fox.

Congratulations goes out to Kaleb on winning the free entry passes as the Laser City Home Reading winner for the month of April. Keep going with the home reading, for every page completed in your reading log you get an entry into the draw. Remember the goal is to try and read at least 15 minutes each night.

In Science this week we continued our study of light and shadows, and worked through a couple more experiments. We are hoping to have our final unit test just before the May long weekend, after which we will begin our study of Plant Life Cycles. As an initial unit activity we will work through several activities designed to help us identify what our current knowledge of plants is and also identify some of the things we are hoping to gain an understanding of.

Health & Human Sexuality
With our health classes next week everyone will be receiving individual consent forms for their child's participation in the grade four health classes focusing on personal health and human sexuality scheduled for later in May. These scheduled classes will be gender separate and focus specifically on the physical, emotional and social changes that occur during puberty; e.g., menstruation, secondary sexual characteristics, changing identity and moods (Alberta Education, Health and Life Skills curriculum, 2002). Participation in these classes is at the discretion of parents and consent forms need to be returned in a timely fashion prior to the class dates as noted on the form.

This last week was Mental Health Awareness Week and to say the school was a hub of activity would be an understatement. Between the theme days, bake sales, and student activities everyone was up and active and focused on raising awareness of mental health and wellness. This topic will continue to be a topic of discussion for the remainder of the year.

Social Studies
This last week in Social Studies we were able to take a closer look at some of the natural resources available in Alberta and see first hand their personal benefits and how they are produced in our province. Everyone had a fabulous time at the Amazing Agriculture event that was hosted at the Expo Centre in Edmonton. With the event our group was able to visit 12 different "booths' with each booth offering different insight in a specific part of Alberta's agriculture. Some highlights included our own hand-made hummus, milking a mechanical cow, planting our own sunflowers, reading to a horse, petting a variety of animals, discovering purple french fries, and experiencing the excitement and confusion of a "farm auction"!

Here are a few pictures from the day...