Good evening 5C,

In French class, we are learning about l'école (the school), and this week, students are creating booklets about different objects in the classroom. I have attached the template we created, to guide students in creating the rough copy of their dialogue for this booklet. Tomorrow we will be creating our actual booklets, using the dialogue students have already written. 

In Social Studies, we are exploring the Great Lakes Saint Lawrence Lowlands region, where the Québec Act was signed in 1774. Together, we went through a comic strip that described the history of British and French settlers in the region, and the impact of the Québec Act on the Canadiens at the time. The Canadiens were francophones who were born in New France, and whose rights were protected by this Act. This was the first step toward Canadian bilingualism. 

Holiday Memory Book

This morning in Language Arts we started to plan for a class holiday memory book. 

Each student will draw a picture to illustrate a favourite memory from the Christmas break, and write a descriptive paragraph to explain the picture.

Once each individual memory has been submitted, I will bind them together to create a class memory book.

To follow up with our discussion regarding separating liquids from yesterday's Science class, we drew the following diagram to demonstrate the process of distillation:

January 11th Highlights

In Language Arts this morning, we continued to discuss goal setting, and examined the quotation: "Most people who fail at their dream, fail not from lack of ability, but from lack of commitment."
This means that quite often when we fail to achieve our goals, it is not because we could not accomplish them, but because we did not have the proper plan in place to achieve them.
When we wrote goals for the month of January, we also wrote out how we will achieve our goals. By writing down a plan with strategies, we are more likely to be able to accomplish what we set out to do. 

During Religion today, students were reflecting on the Annunciation, Epiphany, and the Magnificat. 
When we talk about the Annunciation, we are referring to the moment when the angel, Gabriel, appeared to the virgin Mary and announced that she was to bear a son and name him Jesus. 
Epiphany marks the end of festival season for most Christians. We celebrate this date on January 6th, and it celebrates the visit from the 3 Wise Men to the baby Jesus. 
The Magnificant is Mary's song of praise and thanksgiving. 

In our Classroom Chemistry unit in Science, today we started talking about methods for separating two liquids. If two liquids do not mix, they can be separated by decanting, which can be done using an eyedropper to separate one liquid from the other. When two liquids do mix with one another, but have different boiling points, they can be separating using distillation. This process is demonstrated in the following video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IPXjuOKgUMo 

New Year

Good morning parents and students of 5C.

Happy New Year and welcome back to school!
I trust that you all had an enjoyable and restful Christmas break. 

Yesterday we discussed new years resolutions and goal setting. We brainstormed what makes a successful goal, and which strategies we can use to help us to keep up with the resolutions that we make. Today we will begin the day by making resolutions for the month of January, which we will revisit at the end of the month. 

In Math we reviewed division concepts. Just as we can think of multiplication as repeated addition, we can think of division as repeated subtraction. We practiced some examples of related facts, for example:
2x6=12
6x2=12
12÷2=6
12÷6=2
We can see a pattern as all of these facts are related to one another. The dividend in both division equations is equivalent to the product of the multiplication equations; the factors from the multiplication problems are the same as the divisors and the quotients from the division problems. 

As we wrapped up our chapter on the Atlantic Region in Social Studies before the break, yesterday we started a new chapter: The Great Lakes Saint Lawrence Lowlands Region. We read in the Social textbook, Voices of Canada, that this region is located by the areas mentioned in its lengthy name; this is the area that runs along the Saint Lawrence River, near the lower Great Lakes. In our early discussions of this region, we began reading about and interpreting the happenings at the Iroquois Confederacy, which was created by 6 First Nations groups before Europeans settled in North America, and is one of the oldest democratic societies.