The Web Files

We used Margie Palatini's picture book, The Web Files, with it's references to the old detective show, Drag Net, to talk about fact and opinion.  Duckdective Web and his partner try to quack the case of the pilfered peck of perfect purple almost-pickled peppers.  Nursery rhyme characters are the usual suspects.  The humour of the story allowed us to discuss many different aspects and then create a working definition of 'the facts'.  We sorted facts and opinions about mice into our novel study journal.

We are wrapping up our unit on fractions with a listening exercise and some story problems to solve.  On to Shape and Space next.

We are testing arches and squares in science to see which will hold more mass.  Today we were busy making a hypothesis, testing and evaluating.

What do you think engineers do?

What do you think engineers do?  This is the question that began our new unit in science.  We had a look at the video,  What is engineering?  Ask your student what an engineer does.

Fractions have been our focus in math this week.  We can represent equal and unequal parts, explain the parts of a fraction and demonstrate a fraction in pictures and numbers.

Pillars of Care assembly tomorrow morning at 8:15.  Congratulations to Hafsa, Arianna, Hannah and Yousif our winners for the month of April.

A little of this and a little of that-

Tomorrow is Superhero day - wear your favorite logo!
We have started a little craft for students to make a wristband of their favorite superhero so if they don't have something at home we've got everyone covered.

Spring photos were taken today -

We have finished the lower case alphabet in handwriting and so a little test will be up coming before we begin the upper case letters.

Equal Schmequal

Library day tomorrow -

Today we worked with the words equal and not equal.  First we decided that equal means exactly the same and then we were able to take shapes and cut them into equal and unequal pieces.  We labeled the pieces as one half, one quarter and one eighth.

We are writing letters of encouragement to Despereaux as he has been chucked down the dungeon stairs with the red thread of death around his neck.  We all feel very sorry for him and have bits of advice for him.  This piece of work allows me to see how students are coming along with their use of capitals and periods, complete sentences and subject-verb agreement.  We have almost finished Book The First.

Read 20/10 tonight

Exciting news!

We began our day by making our own fraction kits.  So far we each have a whole, two halves, and 4 quarters.  Grade 3 is the first formal look at fractions for your student.  At home use the language of fractions, half, equal share and help your student see where fractions are useful - in the kitchen, building, sharing a treat.

Exciting news!! We started a new dance today with Jenn from the dance company that was at school a couple months ago.  She started us on a new dance with some pretty complex movements.  Ask your child to share!

Sugar Shock

We had a look at the amount of sugar in our morning snack today and were shocked with how much sugar we are eating.  The amount of sugar in a juice box is almost the daily recommended amount! (6 tsp. per day or 24 grams is the recommended daily amount).  Students who were eating oranges, apples, carrots, grapes, cucumbers were awarded a free sugar star as all those contain natural sugars that our bodies need.  Did you know that cheese and popcorn are also free of sugar?   We also looked at all the words that mean sugar such as glucose and corn syrup.  Your student wrote a sentence about they learned measuring out and comparing sugar containers ask them about it!

I will have some sugar free challenges for them next week.

Thanks to those who came out to math night!

This and that

Scholastic book order for April put in by Friday please.  Students will receive a free book if they order on-line.  You can still send cash or cheques to school if you prefer.

Have your student bring their favorite snack on Friday - necessary for a lesson

Our next unit in science will require a few items from home - the first being a box.  Any size box.  Perhaps some interesting building things like toilet rolls, Pringle chips cans, paper towel rolls.  I will let you know when these things need to come to school.

Math test tomorrow.

Did you know...

Did you know that mice make sounds that are higher pitched than humans can hear?  We do.  As we are learning about mice along with our novel study and hearing and sound in science we discovered this interesting little tidbit.  Cats don't even hear all the sounds that mice can make.  Who knew!
Today we continued reading Tale of Despereaux and that darn mouse has done something terrible - ask your student what he did!

We wrapped up Hearing and Sound in science today with a great little game.  Tomorrow we will have a little 'brain dump' as an opportunity to share everything that we have learned. 

We have also come to the end of our division unit so we will have a unit test on Thursday and finish up our visual journals.

Fun lunch orders must be placed by Friday.
Please make sure you send a snack on Friday as we are looking at active children eating

Chapter 1

We have officially started our novel study of Kate DiCamillo's The Tale of Despereaux.  Today we only read chapter 1 and then we wrote words that describe the character Despereaux.

We are solving some great division problems in our math work - ask your student how they feel about the work they are doing!

Fun lunch order form is in a backpack near you -

Non-fiction text features

We are working our way through a non-fiction text features scavenger hunt - looking for things such as titles, headings, pictures, labels, glossaries and maps in our mini India books.  This allows readers to access information in a fun and light hearted way.

Couple of rounds of math centres were completed this morning as we work our way through division.  Students are able to model equal sharing, represent division with a number sentence and recall facts to 25.

Just another Tuesday

Sticker math was a bit of a challenge today - strategies were shared about how to get started.  Ask your student how they felt about today's math question.

We explored the life and work of  Kate DiCamillo this morning.  We found out she has a brand new book being released today!  I am off the Chapters.

Fireball.  A great gym game.

Library tomorrow -
Read 20/10 tonight

Welcome Back!

Welcome back to school!  I hope everyone had a sunny restful week off.

We were very busy today and right back at things.
We took a deep dive into division today with a box of raisins.  There was a box of raisins for everyone to estimate how many delightful little pieces of fruit were inside.  After estimating we had a peek inside to see how many raisins were on the top.  Students were able to revamp their estimate based on what they could see.  After finding the range of our raisin box estimates and questioning why some boxes were fuller than others and exclaiming the unfairness of that concept we counted how many raisins in our boxes.  Interesting to me that some of us are still counting one by one while others are automatically putting things into groups of friendly numbers to organize thinking.  After grouping our raisins we talked about the strategies people used to arrive at their total.  Some of us counted by 2's while others counted by 10' and 5's.  We wrote sentences such as 4 groups of 5 with 2 leftovers and 6 groups of 4.  Table groups then determined how many raisins they had altogether and then divided out the raisins equally to everyone in our table group.  So much math in one little box of raisins and we are not done yet!

We began a novel study this afternoon by drawing artifacts from the story and making predictions based on what we saw.  Students had some great ideas and I can't wait to share one of my favorite chapter books with them!

Remember to read 20/10