As part of our science learning about Living Systems, we planted some seeds this week! We have poppies and peas growing, and we've been learning about how seeds germinate. As the weeks go on, we'll talk about plant needs, senses, and conservation as well. The students were especially fascinated when we learned about plant cells and DNA which led to some rich discussions! The most exciting event of this week has been the arrival of our chicks! We had 13 hatch, and and the different chicken breeds are all adorable and fascinating to observe. The class has been abuzz about all the interesting chick behaviour, their amusing names, and careful tending to their needs. They've even been the topic of many a poem in our class this week. We can't wait to spend more time with them next week!
We're starting a new unit this week in Math on Data Analysis. Data analysis relates to the collection, organization, and interpretation of information.
In this unit, your child will:
Here are some suggestions for activities you can do with your child.
We had an extra fun counting collection today as we worked with Digi-Blocks! Digi-Block is a base-ten model that students build by themselves using specially-designed boxes (“holders”) to assemble single blocks into blocks-of-10; then they assemble these blocks-of-10 to make blocks-of-100, and they assemble block-of-100 to make blocks-of-1000. The key to PLACE-VALUE is to think of “ten” in two different ways – as one thing and as ten things. With Digi-Block, this potentially confusing duality becomes physically obvious: a block-of-ten looks like one thing, but when it’s open, it looks like ten things! Each table counted a large group of ones, and then over a succession of groupings, we counted exactly 600 blocks as a class!
We were excited to welcome some praying mantises to our class this week! As part of our unit on living systems, our class received a delivery of three mantis hatchlings. They are Chinese mantises, and are currently snacking on flightless fruit flies. Eventually they'll grow large enough to eat crickets! The class has been dutifully checking on them throughout the day since they arrived, and we have named them Joe, Lizzy, and Mant. You can watch the video below to see a mantis laying an ootheca of eggs. This week we've been learning more about chicken adaptations and development! We got to candle a couple of the eggs, and we learned all about the different parts of the egg that allow the chick to develop inside. Students "dissected" their own egg in class to find the albumen, air pocket, embryo, chalaza, yolk, and membrane. It was egg-cellent fun! We've continued our hard work on poetry this week! We focused on writing Thank You Poems and List Poems this week, and the students' creativity was delightful. You can see some of our poems below!
For the next couple of months in Social Studies our class will be focusing on the country of Ukraine! So far the students have noticed that Ukraine has some features in common with Canada, but also some interesting differences. Ukrainian sports, industries, and communities have been interesting so far, and we'll also get to learn lots about Ukrainian culture. ми не можемо чекати (we can't wait)!
This month, we'll been focusing on the essential skill of self-monitoring while reading. But what exactly is self-monitoring? It's the ability to recognize when we're understanding what we're reading and when we're not, and then to take steps to improve our comprehension. In our mini-lessons, we've been discussing strategies such as pausing to check for understanding, asking questions when something doesn't make sense, and rereading to clarify. By practicing self-monitoring, our students are not only becoming more fluent readers but also deepening their comprehension of texts.
3SB has been working hard in our look at 2D shapes math this week. Geometric shapes are all around us, and mathematics can help your child recognize them. Understanding geometric form will help your child appreciate the geometry found in art, design, architecture, and nature. In this unit, the students will:
You can encourage your child to look for geometric shapes and objects around the home and neighbourhood, and talk about them. Here are some suggestions for activities that you can do at home:
So far we’ve learned how to describe and compare shapes and objects using words like vertices, edges, faces, and length! We’ve been very engaged in our Living Systems unit in science recently! In this unit, students will analyze and describe how plants and animals interact with each other and with their environments. We've focused especially this week on food chains and learning about the life of a chicken. It's been a busy and fun week! During our learning on Living Systems, students will:
We were very this lucky today to have the chicken lady Mrs. Hardy deliver 20 eggs for our class! The eggs are settled into the incubator now where they're toasty warm and carefully rotating. This will be the next component of our science unit on Life Systems. Next week we're going to take a peek inside by candling the eggs, and in the coming weeks the chicks will start to peck their ways out of their shells! After that they'll spend about a week in our class before heading to the coop on Mrs. Hardy's farm. The class is already eagerly observing the chicks' progress!
There is an official winner for March Book Madness! After a month of reading, discussing books, and voting, the brackets were narrowed down to one final champion. You can watch the video below to find out which book was named the 2024 champion! It's national poetry month and we're learning all about writing poetry in 3SB! We've read lots of wonderful and varied poetry, and in our poetry writing we've been learning about how poets write about things that they observe and care about, that poets should pay close attention to the world around them and the feelings inside, and that poets revise their poems as they write. The students have enjoyed reading their poems to each other, and there have been lots of emotive and humorous poetry! Coming up in our writing, we'll learn more about language, form, revision, and building poetry anthologies. You can read some of the poems we've been inspired by here and read some of our poems below!
A big highlight this month at school has been the students' presentations all about Peru! They've taught each other all about the animals, land, cuisine, holidays, and important cultural features of this fascinating country. You can see one of the games they learned and the recipe for a delicious Peruvian treat below!
Today our class worked in our Building Thinking Classroom groups to understand an Inuit number system. In the Arctic, a group of Inuit junior high students and their teacher developed the Kaktovik numerals, a unique numerical system suited for quick, visual arithmetic in line with traditional Inuit oral counting methods. Now, with support from Silicon Valley, these numerals are set to become available on smartphones and computers, bridging the gap between traditional and digital realms. Inuit culture, like many others, has its own counting system, rooted in the body, where quantities are described in groups of five, ten, and fifteen, and then in sets of twenty. This system reflects their use of fingers and toes when counting! The class worked hard using a few clues to uncover the mystery numbers, and we solved all the way to 20 (and then beyond) as a group. We were lucky to pilot a Telus World of Science Edmonton program this week where we learned about viewing computational thinking through an Indigenous worldview. Computational thinking is an important piece of our new science curriculum this year, and it was really special to learn about this way of thinking from Natasha who is a Métis sky scientist from TWOSE. Natasha talked about how she's learned from elders and knowledge keepers, and also scientists and scholars. She taught us about two-row wampum belts and how they were used in the first treaty between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people on Turtle Island, representing the two cultures with the blue river of life beads and white beads representing peace, love, friendship. Natasha encouraged students to tell a story with their beading, and also in our coding in class. We also talked about perfection, and how when we make things as people we want to focus on expressing ourselves rather than being perfect. This tied in nicely with the Métis tradition of including a spirit bead in your beading, which is a bead that is misplaced or miscoloured to remember that no one can achieve perfection all the time. During our beading time, Natasha also taught us a lot about coding such as binary code on computers, algorithms, and loops. The students worked hard on their beadwork, and their designs and beading turned out beautifully. It was a meaningful and enlightening project for all of us! We’ve started coding in our class, which means that we’re telling a computer, app, phone, or website what we want it to do. This week we used an app called Lightbot and a some robots called CPX to practice our skills in communicating, solving complex problems, and thinking logically and critically. The class found designing repeating patterns using the lights and speakers on the CPX especially fun! As this article reports, Today, computing is involved in almost all aspects of our lives, from communications and education to social media, banking, information, security and shopping. Networked computers are capable of controlling our homes’ thermostats and lighting, our cars and our health records. You can read more about the thinking behind students being exposed to coding here, and we will keep you updated on our further adventures in coding!
We're down to the elite eight books in March Book Madness! Students are voting between The Day the Crayons Quit, Gaston, Rescue & Jessica, My Pet Feet, The Tree and the River, Hidden Gem, Beneath, and Big. There are lots of opinions in our class on the pros and cons of each book, and we're eager to learn which books make it into the final four! We learned lots and had lots of fun today at Telus World of Science! We got to watch a special presentation about Indigenous sky stories in the Zeidler Theatre, and we participated in the Thrill Rides program led by our science expert which tied into our class' unit on Energy and Forces. Our instructor helped us review concepts on inertia, energy, gravity, and friction. We also were able to explore all of the exhibits in the facility thanks to our four wonderful volunteers! |
Mrs. BarkerMrs. Barker is a grade three teacher at Millgrove School. She loves science and reading, and lives in a little brick house with Mr. Barker and her kids Jack and Ellie. Archive
April 2024
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