Mr. Conte's Grade 6 Class: Thursday, October 24th

Good afternoon everyone!

I hope everyone is having a great week. A reminder that students who are going to Glow Zone tomorrow for the fall fundraiser trip will be going in the afternoon. Students who are not going on the trip will still be here and continuing with work throughout the afternoon.

A quick message from the library…

A few quick reminders:

· Tomorrow is a Day 6 (students need their gym clothes for tomorrow).

o Students going to Glow Zone should come in their gym uniforms.

· The hot lunch site is now open for November! The special this month is chicken stir fry, which is available every Friday. Please DO NOT order lunch for Thursday, November 21^st as we are going on a field trip that day! The lunch site will close October 30^th at 3:00 p.m. and payments will be due by November 6^th.

· Aftercare invoices for the month of September have come out and were due Tuesday, October 15^th, 2019. Any questions can be directed to Ms. Chiappetta at echiappetta@stjudesacademy.com

· Casual day forms were sent home and should be sent back signed with $20 for anyone participating. These are due by TOMORROW Friday, October 25^th, 2019.

· Field Trip permission forms were sent home for our trip to the Canadian Warplane Heritage Museum on November 21^st. These forms are due next Monday, October 21^st and the cost is $27.

Inquiry into Language – After lunch, we sat in our literature circle groups and had a discussion about chapter nineteen. We’re almost through the whole book! A reminder of the roles:

1. The discussion director comes up with insightful questions that will fuel discussion in the group.

2. The literary luminary chooses important passages for the group to read and discuss.

3. The connector makes connections between their own lives and the book (i.e. movies, other books they’ve read, real events, the current UOI, etc.)

4. The illustrator/mapper creates an illustration (i.e. comic, picture, mind map, etc.) based on what they felt during the chapter for the group to discuss.

5. The word wizard chooses 3 words that were interesting or new for everyone to discuss as a group.

After literature circles, we reviewed the form of Before Midnight poems. Students need to have completed their rough copy for tomorrow. A reminder that Before Midnight poems should…

· Have a spooky theme

· Use all of the senses (touch, smell, taste, sound, sight)

· Does not rhyme

· Lines can be long or short but can’t go to the next line

· Lines 1-5 count down to midnight (At ‘x’ minutes before midnight)

· Line 6 starts with ‘At midnight’

· Use a time formula pattern

Music – Then, we had music, which you can read about on Mr. Oliver’s blog (https://mrolivermusicclass.blogspot.com).

French – After this, we had French with Mme. Stella, which you can read about on her blog (https://stjudesfrench-stella.blogspot.com).

Inquiry into Math – We started today by looking at the homework from yesterday together. After we took this up, we did more questions together to practice sketching 3D solids from 2D points of view.

Inquiry into Air – We started the day with an inquiry into the properties of air. Yesterday, we did a series of experiments meant to help us examine these properties. The first thing we did is take up our experiments from yesterday to see what we were learning about air. From these experiments, we learned many things

· air takes up space

· air is a fluid

· air contains oxygen

· air resists things moving through it (the more area, the more resistance)

· when air is heated, the molecules spread out

· when air is cooled, the molecules becomes closer

After we did this, we continued by discussing the scientific method. We looked at the acronym ‘PHEOCA’.

· P – Purpose (or question)

· H – Hypothesis (educated guess)

· E – Experiment (procedures used)

· O – Observation (what you noticed)

· C – Conclusion (is your hypothesis correct)

· A – Application (where do you or could you see examples of what you learned)

Experiments are used to search for cause and effect. Variables are things that can change during an experiment; this can vary during an experiment. An independent variable is one that is

changed by the scientist. A dependent variable are the variables the scientist observes to see how they respond to the change made to the independent variable. Controlled variables are quantities that a scientist keeps constant.

A fair test has been conducted when one factor (variable) is being changed at a time while all others are kept the same. A fair comparison can only be made once variables are being controlled and only one is changing at a time.

After this, we conducted more experiments to learn more about the properties of air, which we will be taking up tomorrow.