Friday marked our final day with Ms. Raino. Thank you to all the parents who brought in treats for our party, and who contributed to Ms. Raino's gift. A special thank you to Jessica and her mom too, as they organised the gift and card. Finally, a big congratulations to Ms. Raino. She is an amazing teacher and we hope to see her at General Wolfe again in the future.
One of the great things that the kids did with Ms. Raino was create a class zine (poetry anthology). The students explored various types of poetry and spoken word as readers, and writers. Every year I am impressed by the students' poetry, but this year was even more impressive. Ms. Raino and the students built on the topics we explored during our Inquiry Project and focused their poems on issues around Social Justice. Their work is stunning! If you haven't seen it yet, get your hands on a copy. The students are so proud of their work that a number of students have volunteered to share their poems with the school during the assembly on June 13th.
As you may know, Division 2 and 4 (Ms. Walker) were involved in a project with SetBC that enabled us to use 7 laptops in our classroom this year. It was a fantastic inquiry into the use of Google Apps and Extensions in the classroom. We focused on Readability and Summarize this as neither required student email addresses and sign ins. Almost all the students found them helpful for non-fiction research and many of them have started using them on a regular basis. Please encourage your child to show you those apps and keep your eyes out for others that might be helpful too! SetBC wrote a nice article sharing our learning:
In the classroom, we are starting a few new units to end the term. In science, we are looking at rocks; in HACE we are creating a "bucket list" for our summer; and in L.A. we are looking at things we can do as a class to address some of the serious topics we have been looking at this term. There are also a ton of field trips, assemblies, and other fun stuff coming up. Check out the calendar for dates.
