May 9, 2014 – Mrs. Black's Class Blog

Today, we held a Social Studies and Science fair in our classroom. Students had an opportunity to showcase for other students in our class the research projects they had been working on for the past month. They were also able to browse and learn about the topics that other students studied.

Grade 4 students completed travel posters for Social Studies, enticing people to visit ancient civilizations. Grade 5 students completed posters or Power Point presentations for Science (Matter and Materials), explaining how a variety of products are made and used. In the next week or so, we will put the fair on again and invite younger students to come and see our class' work.

Here is a gallery of pictures from today's fair (click on any picture to enlarge it):

Click on the bulleted items below to view some of the Grade 5 Power Point presentations. (Note: These links will only work if your computer has the Microsoft Power Point installed on it).

Next step: We will be inviting the Grade 2 class in to see our work.

Thank you for visiting our class BLOG. If you have any questions or comments, feel free e-mail me (Margaret Black): mblack@scdsb.on.ca or to add a comment to this page.

Overall expectation #1 in Writing, in the Ontario Curriculum, asks students to "generate, gather, and organize ideas and information to write for an intended purpose and audience." This project provided students with an opportunity to write for two purposes and three different audiences.

We asked the Kawartha Turtle Trauma Centre (KTTC) to help us turn our persuasive writing unit into something with a real purpose. Staff at the centre told us they would love it if we would write some letters aimed at persuading potential donors (companies and those offering grants) to support KTTC. They said they would also appreciate some kids' thank you letters that they could give to donors.

As you can see from the following pictures, working for a real-world client inspired students to do exemplary work. These are their persuasive letters (click on any photo to enlarge it):

These are samples of their thank you letters to donors:

We also wrote thank you letters to the staff and volunteers at the Kawartha Turtle Trauma Centre for the amazing work they do! Here are samples of those letters:

Thank you for visiting our class BLOG. If you have any questions or comments, feel free e-mail me (Margaret Black): mblack@scdsb.on.ca or to add a comment to this page.