Special Events this Fall

In The last few weeks grade 6 has been lucky enough to share in several special events.

Students ran the ETSB Cross-Country Run in Lennoxville.

 Students had Hallowe'en activities and some of our class performed in Mrs Hodak's seventh edition of Scaryside Academy, "Break a Leg."

Today, we brave the cold weather and enjoyed the Soccer Tournament held at RRHS, where we ties two games, lost one and won one.

In the next few weeks report cards will go home and we will welcome families to Parent's Night, where parents will have an opportunity to meet with me to discuss their child's progress and how to help them succeed.

Happy November,
Ms Napier

iPad Information for Parents

Welcome Parents!

It is always a pleasure to meet new parents on Meet the Teacher night, and equally a pleasure to see parents whose older children I have taught in past years. Thank you for coming tonight.

During our short meeting I will try to address your questions and discuss issues particular to grade 6. Please feel free at ask questions as they occur to you, and if you have additional concerns after tonight please know that I will do my best to answer you as quickly as possible.

Tonight's Agenda
1. Welcome
2. Who am I?
3. Issues pertinent to grade 6
    Collaboration between home and school
    Exams: timing, absences, and report cards
    Technology
    Homework and Practice, follow up using class blogs made by the teacher
    Class Dojo, Kidblogs and ways to help your child
4. Questions and closing remarks

Please accept my best wishes for a positive school year. I look forward to working with you to help your child succeed!
Kathy Napier

Leucan Shaved Head Challenge

Hello Families,

In a few short weeks students here at DES will be participating in the Leucan Shaved Head Challenge. Organized for the fourth consecutive year by cycle two teacher Marie-Michele Fradet, twelve brave students have come forward to raise money for this worthy cause.

Three students from grade six are participating this year. Above you can see Jeremy, Sam, and Kevin, all of whom are excited and motivated to raise as much money as they can to help children battling this cancer. If you would like to support their effort, you can click on this link.

As well, to encourage the class to participate, I will be placing a small piggy-bank on my desk to which students can contribute small change in support of the effort.

The above advertisement brings home the message that this gesture can be very powerful as a show of support for children with cancer.

As some of you may know, Sam is my son. As a parent I had reservations about letting him participate, namely the fear that he would burn his little coconut outside this summer. Last night I ruffled his head and said how I was going to miss those curls.

He looked at me with the kind of withering look twelve-year-olds are so good at and responded, "Mom, some parents miss a lot more than that."

Well said. Congratulations to the participants on their selfless gesture, and good luck with the fundraising.

Writers' Workshop

Hello Families,

Two weeks ago our class was fortunate to have a team of teachers come to work with us for two days. With the help of pedagogical consultants Wendy King and Dale Mackenzie, and Sutton Elementary teacher Cathy Canzani, students wrote and compiled ebooks in just nine hours of class time.

The week before, students had been placed into teams and had been asked to complete a story map. The theme I choose for them to write about was beauty. They were asked to consider what is beauty, and whether it is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. We discussed what beauty could mean, how a moment in time could hold beauty, as could the perfect athletic moment, or a special relationship could be beautiful. Student teams produced very different ideas, from ideas of beauty and romantic love to parental sacrifice, stories inspired from tragic real-life events and stories that followed fairytale conventions. The diversity was very promising.


Monday, Wendy and Cathy led the student groups through the process of storyboarding and then refining their ideas and creating a rough draft. By the end of the day, each team had a story which included a 'snapshot,' a moment in which a scene is described, and a 'thoughshot,' in which the internal world of the character is explored. Students worked very hard to create strong narratives.

On Tuesday, Dale joined us and students used the iBooks Author software to create books which included original photos, drawings, slideshows, audio files, and videos. Students had taken time to decide if they needed costumes or props, and they filmed in and around the school to be able to add widgets to their story.


Two groups decided to use claymation to tell a part of their story. These teams worked with Dale to construct backdrops and build their characters, and used the iMotion app in the iPad to create short stop-motion animation. A very interesting and painstaking process, claymation requires 6 photos per second of video and teams had to think through the movement and dialogue to accompany the animation.

Other teams were able to add special effects to their videos, making it appear that bombs exploded or characters appeared out of a burst of fire. The cool factor was off the charts.




In the last hour of the second day students presented their books to grades four and five. They were very proud of their work, with good reason, and they were able to discuss what they chose to add to the story and why. This project was an excellent example of using technology to enhance learning, and using equipment and applications to do something that cannot be done with pencil and paper. It was very exciting for all of us, and we all learned a great deal.

The final ebooks, available at this link, are worth downloading as a keepsake and to see what your child's team was able to produce.

Many thanks to Wendy, Cathy and Dale, and many congratulations to the students!

Tell them from me...

Students,

Please use the username and password I will give you to log on to this site:
www.tellthemfromme.com

When you are finished, please visit this site,
http://www.mbam.qc.ca/en

and poke around at what we may see tomorrow.

Thank you,
Ms Napier

Technology Use, Special Visitors and Grade Six Projects

Hello Families,

Has your sixth-grader been more tired than usual lately?

In the last two weeks grade six has had a number of interesting projects and activities, ones I hope they have already spoken to you about. They have been participating with enthusiasm and working very hard.

Last week we had the opportunity, through the Discovery Education Network, to participate in a live webcast from Proudfoot Elementary school in Saskatchewan. This Cree school shared why it is important to them to include aspects of their Native identity as part of their daily activities in school, including the role of tribal elders in teaching Cree language and culture. We had the chance to see two Pow-wow dances and hear a drum circle, and the students and teachers spoke about how their school is similar and different to schools off reserves. This webcast was very timely, as our unit on Native Culture continues into next month.

As part of our Language Arts program, the students have been working on book reviews. Students had a chance to hear from experienced book reviewer (and my father) Jim Napier, who in his retirement has begun to review mystery and crime fiction for two newspapers and several on-line websites. Students were amazed to learn that he receives between 400 and 600 books a year from publishers, though he reviews only a fraction of them. He joined the class via Skype for a one hour lecture and discussion of what makes a review effective. You can see some of his work on his website, Deadly Diversions.

In that same week, we had a visit from naturalist Kat Usher of the Earthvalues Institute in Montreal. Kat has been visiting our school once a year for the last twelve years, sharing her knowledge of science and connecting what students know about the natural world to bigger issues of conservation and sustainability. Students love Kat for her sense of humour and her warm personality, her carefully prepared presentations and  the thoughtful way with which she answers questions. Many thanks to the St Francis Valley Naturalist Club, who underwrite this visit. It was, as always, a very interesting and informative presentation!

Student have also been preparing biographical presentations about famous artists as part of the lead up to our visit to the Musee des Beaux Arts next week. With everything going on lately, these won't be finished before Tuesday, but the students have been working hard and have shown great enthusiasm for the subject.

This week's big project deserves it's own post. Hope to write you soon about our Writer's Workshop two-day event and the wonderful ebooks that were produced.

Warm regards,
Kathy Napier

Math Practice and the Ministry Exams

This photo has nothing to do with the following post. But just the same, Yay Team!

Hello Families,

Over the last week a couple of families have gotten in touch about having some extra work to prepare for the ministry exams. While I have sent some photocopies when asked, there is a great deal of free material on the internet.

That said, finding information on the internet is "like taking a drink from a fire hydrant" (Mitchell Kapor, via Lucacept).   

So apart from the sites listed on the sidebar of this blog, here are some sites I can recommend:

Math Frog, where you will find self-correcting games students can use to practice skills

Math Games, a site I am still exploring but that has many levels of practice available for students.

Bedtime Math, which has a "problem of the day" format with leveled questions to help the whole family get involved, and has tips for helping kids find math fun

Figure This! Math Challenges work different problem-solving skills, with and without calculation

A+ Click gives you math practice by grade level and by are of math, and lets you browse math question by thumbnail.

IXL provides math sheets with Canadian content links, so that you can see what kids need to know in our province

Math is Fun offers one of the best illustrated Math Dictionaries on the web


Most of these sites I found on the metasite Great Websites for Kids, sponsored by the American Library Association. This site provides sites for students to use that are from reputable sources and  offer sounds academic value, sorted by subject and rating.

For many of the students, current math errors are not a result of misunderstanding of concepts, but rather calculation inaccuracies and shortcuts in procedures that lead to errors. If this is the case for your child, having them practice their skills is still the best way you can help them. Ipod apps such as PopMath are painless ways to have them squeeze in extra practice on the go.

One of the best ways to help you child is still to check their homework. Insist they correct any mistakes you find, that they present solutions that are complete and diagrams that are fully labelled, and that they use the formula they are taught.

Thank you, once again, for all that you do to help your child, and please let me know if there are any questions I can answer.

Warm regards,
Kathy Napier

Light Reading for Parents

Hello Families,

Often when I am reading on-line I will come across an article that I think may be interesting to the parents of my students. I bookmark it and save it until it comes up in conversation but rarely do I get a chance to share it at large, so today I am posting links to a few articles I think might interest you. Anytime words below are coloured, they will lead to an article.

The first was shared with the students already. You should have seen the shock on the kids' faces! It is hard to imagine, but research shows that a student who reads 20 minutes every day will read about 1 800 000 words by the end of sixth grade, while a student who reads ten minutes once a week (or 1 minute a day) will read only 8 000 words in the same time-span. This article on Edudemic has an interesting infographic on the effects of skipping reading homework.

The ideas in this article from TIME magazine were also shared with the students, to help dispel the idea that only 'smart' kids can do math. Motivation, not IQ, determines how much someone learns, showing that a positive attitude and perseverance are the key to achievement.

Sleep is also a big concern when I speak with parents, and it should be. Sleepiness can cause learning, behaviour, and attention problems, all of which can negatively affect students' academic achievement and their ability to form healthy relationships. It is recommended that children in grade six get ten to eleven hours of sleep a night, particulalry as their rapid growth at this age can leave them feeling tired more easily. This article lists reasons why today's children sleep less than previous generations, and tells us what we can do about it.

The last two sites I have to share I found after the tragedy at Sandy Hook Elementary, when I wanted to prepare myself to face students' questions and concerns about safety and violence against children. One is from the University of Minnesota, "Talking to Your Children About Violence Against Kids," and the second is more general, and deals with talking to kids about death. Neither is a conversation we want to have, but when we as adults don't give kids a chance to discuss hard topics, we risk having them get all their information from peers and from the media.

 Please feel free to share additional helpful sites and articles in the comments below.

Warm regards,

 Kathy Napier