We’ve already had fun planning and building vases to hold a bouquet of flowers and a gift box to hold a chocolate, and the students are eagerly planning their model playgrounds for next week!
The students were excited to start our new Science unit on building this week! In this unit, students will use a variety of tools and simple techniques to build things for specific purposes. Their tasks will include building a bridge to span a gap, a model playground, and a stool to hold a person. Through these projects, students will learn the value of safety and good workmanship and that different materials and designs can be used to obtain the same result. We will talk about how working together on a common task is easier when ideas and materials are shared collaboratively. We’ve already had fun planning and building vases to hold a bouquet of flowers and a gift box to hold a chocolate, and the students are eagerly planning their model playgrounds for next week! This week we were very lucky to meet (virtually) with a grade three class from Athabasca Delta School in Fort Chipewyan! We taught them a bunch about what we've been learning in our unit on Testing Materials and Designs, and they taught us a bunch about their very neat fly-in community and the winter road that opened today! It was really special to connect with them, and we're excited to visit with them in the coming months!
This week in Coding School the class was thrilled to code with Adafruit's Circuit Playground Express! We created code for a Christmas light display, created an instrument that we could play Jingle Bells with, and created some music and light sequences. This interesting device sure made for a fun week! This week in Coding School we've been working hard on creating our own video games! Each student created their very own Capture and Evade game, and then we started on making a Platformer game. The class was very impressive with their computational thinking, and we made plenty of use of our skills in algorithms, decomposition, pattern recognition, generalization, and abstraction. You can play your child's video game by using the link they posted on Seesaw!
In grade three, we are learning about measuring height in centimetres (and millimetres, decimetres, and metres) and we also learn about life cycles. To get started on these learning outcomes, this week we got some amaryllis plants in our classroom. We will be tracking the growth of these plants over time and observing changes as their life cycles progress. The students especially enjoyed naming their plants, and we are curious to see how the plants grow in the weeks ahead!
We’ve been learning all about fair tests, hypotheses, beams, pillars, materials, and conclusions in Science these days! You can see some photos below of some of our experiments this week.
We had our second coding session this week with the Northern Coding Academy from Telus World of Science! This week we learned about some of the foundations of computational thinking including pattern recognition and decomposition. It was fun to explore computational thinking with some interactive activities, and we learned so much from our coding expert Amanda!
This month in Science we’ve been learning all about the rock cycle, and the three types of rocks: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. Jess Geo sent us a video message and she gave us lots of useful information about different igneous rocks! You can see her video below. We looked at examples of each type of rock and examined their properties just like a geologist. You can check out the extra videos below to learn a bit more about rocks and how they are formed!
In our continuing work for Jess Geo this month, we learned about a variety of properties of minerals and conducted some tests to describe our minerals' properties. Very excitingly, we were able to identify the minerals graphite, magnetite, apatite, copper, muscovite, sulfur, talc, quartz, fluorite, obsidian, halite, and hematite for Jess Geo this month using the properties of smell, streak colour, light properties, colour, shape, hardness, lustre, magnetism, and texture! We hope that she will be impressed by our work, and we'll get to learn about the rock cycle next week!
We’ve been digging deep into our science learning about rocks and minerals this week! We’ve worked on classifying and sorting objects, tapping into our geological background knowledge, and next week we will be tasked with the very important mission of helping geologist Jess Geo from the Royal Alberta Museum. Jess is asking us to help sort some minerals that got jumbled up in transit, and we will start our mission next week by profiling each of the ten minerals. In our unit on Rocks and Minerals this term, we’ll be learning lots of important concepts about materials that make up the Earth’s crust:
Students are welcome to bring interesting rocks or minerals from home to share with the class during our science class. They've already bringing some in to share, and there have some very cool specimens so far! This week we went to explore all the animals and plants at the John Janzen Nature Centre! We took a look at a local pond, explored animals in the pond with nets, and identified local species of critters and plants! We got to peer at a pond creatures life cycle from beginning to end and discovered the web of life of a pond ecosystem.
In the afternoon, we investigated habitats around the Nature Centre for tracks and traces that animals left behind. We also honed our hiding skills and practiced stalking prey with some games! It was a beautiful day to explore the river valley, and we learned so much about animal life cycles. We had a transformative experience this month as we saw our pupa metamorphosize into butterflies! The class had fun taking them out at different times to watch them fly out into the big wide world of our school field. It was very exciting to watch them come out of their chrysalises and pump up their wings. You can watch the videos below to see the life cycle of the Painted Lady butterfly. We’ve started coding in our class this month, 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 soon will use some robots named Dash and Dot to practice our skills in communicating, solving complex problems, and thinking logically and critically. The class found working with a partner to solve problems especially fun!
As this CBC 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... Computational thinking allows preschoolers to grasp concepts like algorithms, recursion and heuristics—even if they don’t understand the terms, they’ll learn the basic concepts." I had the privilege of working with Dr. Cathy Adams at the U of A on some research during my Education degree, and she was interviewed here and here about coding in our curriculum, saying, "This is not about raising a generation of coders, but about educating a new generation of creative, engaged and ethical citizens who are able to understand, participate and critically evaluate the new digital landscapes that we are increasingly working, playing and living in." 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 were very excited to get an update from Mrs. Hardy about our chicks this week! They're growing so well, and have a nice big home to explore now. Mrs. Hardy describes the home they're in now as the elementary school for chickens, and soon they'll be graduating on to junior high! We miss them, but are really glad they have such a wonderful home.
We've had a delightful month with the chicks, and they officially made the trip back to their farm today! We got to meet Mrs. Hardy who taught us a lot about the chicken life cycle and how the chicks will live on the farm, and we got to see some older chicks from a couple of months ago who had grown so much! The class was very sad to see them go because we've grown accustomed to their silly antics, musical chirping, and cuddly-soft feathers. We learned so much about their life cycles, and the students were devoted caretakers to these newborns. The students of 3B were wonderful chick parents!
The big highlight four our class this week was getting to visit the Royal Alberta Museum! We learned lots about Indigenous peoples, Alberta's history, Albertan animals, rocks & minerals, fossils, vehicles, and bugs. A big thanks goes out to our wonderful volunteers who led groups, and the students did a great job trekking around the large building. We wrote journals this morning summarizing what we'd learned, and it was neat to see all the different things that stuck out to them during our trip.
Our class is in charge of two planter boxes at Millgrove this spring, and we enjoyed preparing the soil and planting this week! The class worked hard to plan, dig, and distribute the seeds, and now we’ll work on watering and fertilizing them. You can watch the video below to see some of what we discussed about seeds and plant growth. We planted carrots, pumpkins, onions, and potatoes, so hopefully we’ll have some carrots before summer break! The students successfully completed the research and writing for their non-fiction animal books this month! They typed up all their findings in a variety of subtopics, so to celebrate we had a well-deserved book publishing party and got to share our reports with each other (and watched Born to Be Wild about orangutans and elephants). It's always satisfying to see our hard work in writing pay off!
|
Mrs. BarkerMrs. Barker is a grade three and literacy 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
May 2024
Categories
All
|