We had a busy first week back to school!

Survivor Science Challenges

This week we participated in two Survivor Challenges! The first one had the tribes comparing the strength of an accordion bridge, a rectangular beam bridge and a box girder bridge using books as our weights!

The second challenge had tribes comparing the strength of an arch spanning a 15cm gap compared to an arch spanning a 25cm gap!

Mrs. C and I always get a chuckle when the students put on their buffs to start our science class and a few of the boys insist on wearing theirs like babushkas! It's especially hilarious when they are acting like tough "Fire Bandits"! The students in 3C are the CUTEST! I can't wait to introduce them to babushkas when we start studying Ukraine!

Literacy

During our Working With Words time this week, we tried out a new literacy game and the students LOVED it! They had to roll alphabet dice 36 times to fill in a 6 by 6 array (insert multiplication concepts here...haha!). Once they had all of their letters entered, they had to find as many 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 letter words as possible. The letters in each word had to be "touching" on the grid. The students learned that they wanted to place certain letters together and we brainstormed a list of combinations that we would try to put together the next time we played (eg; ed, ing, at, bl, sh, th, ch, ang, etc.). We played the game again on Friday and the students were so impressed with how much they improved thanks to some mindful letter placing!

Since the beginning of the year, I have been focusing our read alouds around teaching the students simple comprehension, accuracy, fluency and expanding vocabulary strategies. We have also used our read alouds to examine and explore different genres of books, comparing nonfiction to fiction texts and studying authors word choice. As we approach the final three months of grade three, I am excited to share a different reading experience with them. We have started to read the book Wonder by R.J. Palacio.

Wonder is a pretty serious read and it brings up THE BEST conversations! I love sharing this book with my students because it truly opens their eyes to the power of a book...how it can change the way you think, how it can make you question your beliefs, your actions and your character and how it can make you care deeply for a character that you've never met! Reading this book with the students enables them to use all of the comprehension strategies we have been working on and demands them to think a little deeper. Each year, I watch students transform as readers as they loose themselves in this story. I'm sure many of you have already heard about the main character August and the journey that he his embarking on. I encourage you to check in with your child each day and ask them what is happening in the book! They will love to share the story with you!

Numeracy

Our work with multiplication has been going well! The students are enjoying the challenge of something brand new! They are working on connecting a repeated addition sentence, multiplication sentence, picture and an array. We are also working on finding patterns within our multiplication tables and skip counting by 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s and 6s.

Zirka Performance

The students all enjoyed the Zirka performance on Friday morning! This special activity was the perfect introduction to the Ukrainian culture for the grade three students!

April Already!

It is hard to believe that there are only three months left in this school year! Every year I am amazed by how time flies! March was a ridiculously busy month! There was so much going on! I managed to email parents but didn't get the blog updated...well that's actually only half true...I had worked on a post for over two hours that was loaded with photos and something glitched and I lost EVERYTHING! My fingers and toes are crossed that that doesn't happen again!

A definite highlight of March was our Hot Dogs for Humpty sale! I hope that you all were able to get a copy of the Devon Dispatch to see the story about us! It is still up online if you missed it! This was such an amazing experience for our class! They took a leadership role in our school community, organized and helped with the collecting of orders, counting of money and adding up our grand total that was raised! It was so neat to see how eager they were through each step of the process and I couldn't be more proud of them!

Another highlight from March was the bridge building workshop and celebrating Tunisia Day! Unfortunately, I was busy with the hot dog sale so I was unable to get any photos of the bridge building workshop but the students came back completely pumped about starting our new science unit! Tunisia Day was fantastic! The students enjoyed tasting the food (couscous, flatbread with olive oil, baklava and dates), playing Mancala, weaving and creating a mosaic piece of art! A HUGE thank you goes out to all of our parent volunteers that helped run each station! 

We also started our Survivor Challenge Unit in Science! Students have been put into tribes and will work together to test a variety of building materials and methods. Students put on their tribal colours (bandanna) at the start of each class and follow tribal rules to work as a successful team!

Introducing...

The Fire Bandit Tribe

The Savage Tribe

The Dragoness Tribe

The Black Bandit Tribe

The teams have completed two challenges so far and have been focusing on the scientific process and creating a fair test. They know that:

• only one variable can be changed in each experiment. 
• they need to make a hypothesis before starting the experiment.
• they need to accurately record the data that they have collected during the multiple trials of the experiment. 
• they need to come to a conclusion to either prove or correct their hypothesis.

Add to this excitement, an assembly performance, the girl's floor hockey tournament, the Family Dance, starting the multiplication unit in math and starting an amazing new book during read alouds...phew no wonder time has flown by!