Stations of the Cross

We cordially invite all parents, grandparents and siblings to our class presentation. Our class, along with Mrs.Cosman's class with be performing the Stations of the Cross on Holy Thursday. We will be celebrating this event Thursday, April 2 at approximately 10:45 am.

LET'S ALL PITCH IN!!

COMING SOON....THE ST. GABRIEL GREAT BIG SPRING CLEAN

Are you starting to clean out your closets? Getting rid of old clothing, sheets and towels? Save them for the St. Gabriel Great Big Spring Clean!  In partnership with the Canadian Diabetes Association, we will be collecting garbage bags of gently used clothing, towels and sheets.  They will be picking up in May (date to be determined), so if you are cleaning out those closets, PLEASE  put them aside for us. If you would like to drop them off at the school before May,we can hold them here for you!

Our goal is to collect at least 300 garbage bags of clothing, if we do this, our school Social Justice Club will earn $1.50/bag towards our fundraising endeavours for our village in Ecuador.

RATES AND RATIOS

The grade 6 students are starting to explore rates and ratios in math class. We normally introduce these concepts along side our fraction unit. At times, this can be a blessing and sometimes--not so much! We all work with ratios and rates all the time in our daily lives-50km/hour, there are 11 girls to 15 boys in school 11:15. I am encouraging the students to go over the videos below to familiarize themselves with the concepts we learning in class. Please remind them they can come back to the blog any time to go over these videos, especially if they are having difficulty with homework problems. They're also great tools for Parents to 'refresh'  their understanding of rates and ratios.

 

FRACTION HELP!!

I recently found another website with some very good videos and games related to fractions. They have brief video presentations that explain concepts we are taking in class and they also have mini-tests that your child can attempt once they have reviewed the video. See the  link below

FRACTION HELP

W.O.W Assembly

Another fantastic performance by our St. Gabriel Rock Band! Also want to congratulate our class winners for the Month of February. Way to go !!!

FRACTIONS ARE FOUNDATIONAL

We have been working with fractions for the last few weeks. The students are learning to represent, compare, add and subtract fractions. We are also practising converting between improper fractions (8/5) and mixed numbers ( 2   1/3). The students have learned how to do this with visual representations as well as with algorithms. Do you remember?? For 2  1/3 we multiply the denominator by the whole number and then add the numerator to the product and then put that number over our denominator
 ( 3x2+1= 7, the 7 becomes the numerator and 3 remains the denominator  7/3). These are concepts that need to be mastered in order to continue their growth in mathematical thinking and processing. I am including a link to a Ministry sponsored site that will allow them to practice these concepts. Each one of these links is meant to be viewed and played in order. This is something the student could do for 20 minutes a night over the course of the entire fraction unit. This is not a race to complete all of the videos and activities, but rather it's a way to consolidate their learning and demonstrate mastery over the concepts.

MATHIES FRACTION VIDEOS AND GAMES
REPRESENTING FRACTIONS PART 2
COMPARING SIMPLE FRACTIONS PART 3
IMPROPER FRACTIONS AND MIXED NUMBERS PART 4

FRACTIONS ARE PARTS OF A WHOLE!

We started working on our fractions unit late last week. We created several anchor charts that you see here. Fractions are a key building block in math and as such it's critical that students are comfortable with representing, comparing and manipulating fractions.  I am including some extra math practice sheets into this blog post  for parents to download and work through them with their children. Several students are having difficulty understanding the relationship between fractional representations, like fraction circles and fraction strips and equivalent fractions. For example, in the fraction strip to the right of this page we can see 2 3/4. The number of 'pieces' the strip is divided into tells us what the denominator is. I can also look at this picture and make an improper fraction with it. I merely have to count how many 1/4 pieces I have. In this example, I have 11/4. Therefore 2  3/4 is equivalent to 11/4. Try the worksheets together and see how they do. We  also learned a mathematical way to convert between mixed numbers and improper fractions--the worksheets address both ways.
                                        CLICK on the link and then download and print off at home.

GRADE 5 FRACTION              GRADE 6 FRACTION

CULMINATING ACTIVITIES IN SCIENCE

 The students are working on their culminating, hands on activities, for their science units. The grade 6 students are putting the principles of flight to the test by creating their own flying machine. The grade 5 students are creating their own energy efficient home that puts into practice all the elements of renewable and non-renewable energy sources. They also will have to include modern technological advances that make it possible to conserve energy. Motion sensitive light switches, solar panels , energy efficient windows and appliances are just a few ideas of the items that they might want to include in their design.