Happy New Year! I hope everyone is savouring every moment of our two-week holiday! Time flies!

In Math, we will be having our end of unit Patterning Test on January 9th. I will use Monday and Tuesday as ‘review of concept’ days. I have also just now updated Prodigy to include a Patterning challenge, please encourage your child to check it out! Nelson Math 3 Try It Out is also another good review. Up next in our Math Curriculum we will be starting a unit on 2-D shapes. The goals of this unit are for your child to use shapes to make other shapes, to identify shapes that are congruent (the same size and shape), to identify and compare various polygons (i.e., triangles, quadrilaterals, pentagons, hexagons, heptagons, octagons) and sort them by their geometric properties (i.e., number of sides, side lengths, number of interior angles, number of right angles), and to recognize symmetry in shapes, designs and pictures of images. Your child should begin to notice interesting geometric designs in his or her world. You might talk to your child about how these designs have been created. We will work with tangrams! Ask your child to google search and watch – “Sage’s Journey: How Tangrams Came to Be.”

Throughout the unit, you and your child may engage in activities at home such as:

• Your child can look for shape puzzles at home. Look in resources such as newspapers and puzzle books. Your child could bring a puzzle to school to display on a class bulletin board or puzzle table.

• Your child can find and list things around the house that have more than one line of symmetry, and sketch at least 4 of these items and show the lines of symmetry.

• Your child could plan a symmetrical design for one wall of a bedroom or some other room in the house. This might include the placement of pictures or posters on the wall. Your child can draw a sketch of the symmetrical design, draw the line of symmetry, and describe how the design was created.

• Your child can find something at home, such as a rug, a vase, or a bedspread, that has an interesting geometric pattern. Have your child draw the pattern and describe attributes such as congruent shapes, lines of symmetry (e.g., vertical, horizontal, diagonal), and colour. Your child should then describe how the pattern was made. This is called the pattern rule. Your child might take the real object or a drawing of the object to class to share with others.

I will be sending home our Star of the Week Schedule and details pertaining to this project next week.

Our Working with Words (spelling unit) will start on Tuesday. It will be a Tuesday to Tuesday schedule to allow students weekend to finish up and practice their words if need be. Book worm body parts will still remain a part of our regular homework routine as well.

Ms. B, our second year, U of O student teacher will be leaving us on January 24th – we have really enjoyed her help and presence in our classroom. The children will miss her.

We will also be starting our unit of Dance in Physical Education classes. Some students cringe at the word “dance,” but gently remind your child it is all about participation and trying their best, not about who can do the best Fox Trot!