Today marks the first Sunday of Advent - the Sunday of Hope. We have Hope in God's faithfulness to us, and in His promise to us of Eternal Life. On Monday at 10:00 a.m., the junior students will participate in the first of 4 Advent Liturgies to remind us of the importance of Hope in this season, and in our world today.
We have a few charitable initiatives that are continuing this week. The first is our Advent Project, when we collect items for the Shepherds of Good Hope. This year, Gr. 4 students have been asked to bring in facial wipes and travel size Kleenex, both of which are readily available at the dollar store. The facial wipes are disposable pre-moistened wipes (not diaper wipes) and cost $1.25 per package. The kleenex are the pocket packs. Please send them in with your child if you are able to. Thank you. The second initiative is a "Pay It Forward" project from the Me to We Club. They are collecting new or gently used items that students at Our Lady of Mount Carmel School could purchase as gifts for their siblings or parents at nominal cost. Items could include: -jewellry- baseball caps- toys- Christmas ornaments- Christmas gift bags- tissue paper and anything else you feel would be appropriate as a gift for the students to purchase for family members. The Me to We Club is very excited about being involved in this initiative, and have collected many gently used items already! Thank you for your support!
Other happenings this week:
-this week is Hour Of Code week, where students across the world are encouraged to take part in an hour of coding some time during the week. We will do an hour in addition to the hour we did with our reading buddies last week, and with the other Gr. 4 class the week before. Coding is important, and will be added to the math curriculum soon. It's great to see so much excitement about problem solving and logical thinking!
-Thursday is our next Faith Buddy Day. We will join our Faith Buddies, Mrs. Fitzpatrick's class, during 4th block to participate in some activities that encourage Hope.
-Friday, St. Peter's Band will be coming to play a Christmas concert for us in the gym. We look forward to this every year! Seeing former students return, and share their musical talents with us is a highlight of the season!
Science - we have been doing a lot of experiments to show all of the properties of light! Here are the properties and the experiments we did to prove each one:
Properties of Light
1 Light travels in straight lines: We lined up cue cards, punched holes in the centre of 3 of them and drew a target on the 4th, then shined a flashlight through the holes to land on the target.
2. Light that is not reflected is absorbed: We used different coloured papers, tinfoil and mirrors to see which ones reflected light the best, and which ones absorbed more of the light.
3. Light reflects off a smooth shiny surface in a regular reflective pattern: We used mirrors to bounce light around inside a shoe box, in one side and out the same side but further down the box.
4. Light reflects off a rough shiny surface in an irregular pattern: We reflected light off of crumpled tinfoil.
5. Light bends or refracts when it goes through water: We put a pencil in a cup of water and looked at it from the side. We also looked at small items and newspaper through water lenses, and refracted light through prisms.
Math: We have completed our Geometry unit, and will have a test this week, likely Wednesday. Please have your child review quadrilaterals and their properties (see the anchor chart on an earlier blog post), lines of symmetry, and acute, right, obtuse and straight angles. We will be starting a short unit on Data Management, that hopefully we can complete before Christmas break.
Language Arts: We have completed our Google Read & Write training with Mme Campeau-Leblanc. She taught us many tools and tricks for editing and proof-reading our work using Google tools. We have started writing and editing Christmas stories, which we hope to read to our reading buddies before Christmas. I was very impressed with the amazing commercials the students made for their cereal boxes! Such creativity!
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