Daily Dose


Dear Grade Four Friends,

Please have a look in your child's backpack tonight in order to find a form that needs to be completed and returned by this Friday the 28th. Mr. Lee is asking that every child update their general information including contact info.

Today we had the pleasure of watching a rehearsal of the school's music-concert that will be held on Thursday evening at 18:00 in the auditorium. Please join us on Thursday night at NIS for this special event. 

Please do not forget that Mr. Derick & Mr. Mark will be hosting an information session this Wednesday, November, 26^th after our teachers meeting. The information session will start at about 3:30 depending on the length of our teachers meeting. We will host it in Mr. Derick’s room, 302 located on the third floor of Building B.

We will go over our first, Inquiry Unit “Production Culture and Economics” by examining the Understanding by Design (UbD) curriculum framework and the pedagogy including the standards that we used to build the unit and to assess the students.

We will show many different kinds of assessments that we engaged the children with during the inquiry unit “Production Culture and Economics.” We will share a wide range of the assessments that we utilized in order to measure student ability and comprehension of the various skills, knowledge and deep-understandings. These assessments will be both traditional as well as nontraditional and they will be differentiated in order to provide as much personalization for each child as possible. 

We also have a lot of wonderful assessments and activities that we have engaged that will be shown via pictures and video. 

We will also try to answer any questions or concerns regarding the ‘Production Culture and Economics’ inquiry-unit and the grade four curriculum and instructional practices as taught via the Understanding by Design framework and inquiry pedagogy including highly personalized (student centered) differentiated assessments: formative and summative. 

We will provide a brief introduction to the next Inquiry Unit titled, “Life Cycles.” 

We hope that you can all make it.

In the future, we will plan a big, end-of-unit party (BBQ or something) to celebrate the children’s learning, and to build meaningful relationships and an overall positive culture-of-learning within our grade four learning community. In December, we are planning to have a play to perform for you all, and we are working on a Christmas Song and poetry reading… This will be good!

Quote of the Day

“Genius is an exceedingly common human quality, probably natural to most of us.” ― John Taylor Gatto