News From Our Beach Drive Learning Commons

The Grade 5s have been working in teams reading and creating questions for their first ‘Book Battle’.  The purpose of the battle is to encourage students to read and discuss different genres of books. There are four teams per class and each team has a bin of eight titles to read. Students can split titles up so each team member only has to read a few but the students are encouraged to read as many of the titles as possible.  The teams then create questions for the other teams to answer at the ‘Book Battle’ which we will hold on December 7. The Grade 4s have been looking at an author’s purpose…is it to entertain, instruct, inform, persuade or a combination of these? Using the thinking routine Parts, Purposes and Complexities, and the examples of Robert MacFarlane’s Lost Words to inform and persuade and The Inventions of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick to entertain, the students chose a book to ‘take apart’. Fiction and non-fiction books were explored, discussed, presented and the author’s purpose was celebrated.  The Grade 5 Innovation Lab co-curricular students have been working together to create ozobot mazes, sphero obstacle courses and experimenting with integrating the equipment to create even more innovative contraptions. They even experimented with using spheros in water! The Grade 3s had local author Penny Draper virtually visit on December 2. She discussed what it is like to be an author, the writing process and shared information about her fantastic book, Graveyard of the Sea, a  historical fiction novel from her  ‘Disaster Strikes’ series. The students were able to ask her questions over Google Meet. We enjoyed learning more about ‘the bug’, shipwrecks on the West Coast and lighthouses. We now know so much more about fresnel lenses and morse code! There is an excellent link to the West Coast Trail shipwrecks here. Recently, all of the Grade 1s received a book as part of the TD Grade One Book Giveaway . This year the book was Moira’s Birthday by Robert Munsch.  For holiday gift ideas  the most popular titles in our library are Mo Willems books, Elise Gravel’s Disgusting Critters and Olga series’, Issadora Moon and Dragon Masters series, C.S. Lewis Narnia series, Keeper of the Lost Cities series, I Survived series, Raven Tales graphic novels, Super Agent Jon Le Bon graphic novels and of course our Harry Potter Collection.  Thank you so much to families who have donated books to our collection. Thank you also for gently used picture books and board books  which we collect in our pink 1000 x 5 bin. All donations are gratefully received. Happy reading,Mrs. McLeod