Week 24

 ELA - News Article Reporting 

In final preparation for their upcoming teacher and student interviews, students worked to create a basic class list of possible questions to ensure they determine the who, what, where, when, why and how for their news article. This week, students will be choosing topics, and will be visiting Ramsay classrooms to complete their interviews. Responses will then be used by students to write their news articles, which will focus on current learning in our school community 

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Social Studies 

When consuming news, it is important to distinguish between fact-based news reporting and commentary. A healthy democracy requires journalists to keep those in power accountable and to inform citizens. In social studies this week, we looked at Fact vs. Opinion journalism. In addition to our posted objectives, our learning helps to support our own article writing, while simultaneously supporting our critical thinking skills when watching or reading the news. 

 Learning Objectives included: 

• understand the difference between fact and opinion; 

• distinguish between fact-based news reporting and opinion- journalism; 

• analyze a news article 

 

 

  

  

Math 

In math this week, grade 6 students continued their work on transformations, and demonstrated their understanding by ‘moving’ shapes along a coordinate grid based on multiple instructions for translations, reflections and rotations. Grade 5 students continued working on shape and space objectives by learning additional geography vocabulary used to describe lines and shapes, as well as learning how to distinguish the differences between quadrilaterals. 

 

 

Learning Objectives: 

- I can recognize that evidence found at the scene of an activity may have unique characteristics that allow an investigator to make inferences about the participants and the nature of the activity. 

- I can give examples of how specific evidence may be used. 

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 We will be going on a field trip to the Police Interpretative Centre on Tuesday, April 5th. We will be sending out forms for this trip before the spring break and will require at least 2 volunteers to join us. If you are available for a full day field trip on this day, please send an email. 

In preparation for our visit, we have started our science unit entitled, Evidence and Investigation. To begin we discussed possible definitions for evidence and investigation. Students had a lot of prior knowledge and came up with several examples for both. They were then asked to come up with some questions that they hope to answer during the unit. Here are a few examples. 

• - If you find a fingerprint, how do you determine who it belongs to? ( MM) 

• - How do you know whose fingerprint or footprint it belongs to? How long do investigations take? ( ON) 

• - How do you tell whose blood is whose? ( HI) 

• - How do you tell how fast someone was moving by examining a footprint? (RL) 

• - How do you figure out who the victim is if there is no evidence? ( AD) 

Our next step was to discuss what role the Calgary Police Force plays within our community. Here are some of the key questions we explored: 

• - What is crime? How does crime impact our communities?  

• - What is the Calgary Police Service?

• - What do they do and what role do they play in our community?  

• - How are crimes solved? 

 

Activity #1: 

When a crime happens, what steps do you think detectives and crime scene officers go through to solve it? In small groups, students were given a series of steps that are included in the process. They worked with a partner to determine the correct order. 

 

On Friday, we discussed the importance of observation skills within the investigation process. We then discussed the role of a witness in an investigation and the qualities and characteristics that make a good witness. Students were then put to the test. They were given one minute to examine a picture. Once the time was up, the picture was removed, and students had to answer specific questions based on details in the picture.They did an awesome job, but there were some tricky ones that most missed.  

 

Because there were no specific questions asked, our brains process the information differently and may not have absorbed every detail. This process is similar to when a witness has to recall details of an event to police officers.