Such an awesome day! Mother Nature cooperated and gave us a day perfect for exploring the pond and forest habitats. It wasn't too hot and it wasn't too cold- even the bugs left us alone. We had a great time learning about the animals that live in and around the forest. At the pond dipping station, many students even caught frogs, spiders, and beetles (but released them back of course). At the animal evidence station students learned about amphibians, reptiles, and mammals and looked for traces of their activity in the forest during a game of bingo. Meanwhile at the habitat station, students learned what makes a good habitat for two different types of frogs and then went in search of the perfect area to build a home for their very own frog! All in all, a great day!
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Look at these grade 3s! They are tackling basic algebra (using a letter in place of a unknown value and finding the value using mathematical operations). How awesome is that? Then they observed and named their own caterpillar to watch its life cycle unfold over the next couple of weeks. Today we pretended we were grade 3 students in the country of Ukraine and played a common game that students there like to play. A student is blindfolded and spun by the group 10 times. On the 10th spin everyone yells "Did Panas" and jumps back. The group claps to try to confuse the person from guessing who they are and where they are. The blindfolded person then has to search for someone and once they find them, they must correctly guess who they have found. If they do, that person becomes the next it! The game was a big hit and already they are asking to play it some more! We also had a little food chain lesson in our pond life study. The giant water beetle that we put in there showed it's classic predator traits as it went after and ate one of the fish. Although unpleasant, it was a very good conversation about nature, predator/prey relationships, and the food chain.
We are putting our 3D skills to the test today. We have learned about the shapes in 2D and now are extending our knowledge to 3D shapes! We used the following worksheet to introduce the naming of 3D shapes. Do you think you can name some more? Try these!
We had a great surprise today! Our P.A.C brought in two salads and a fruit/veggie juice for the kids to try today. Most kids tried both the Caesar salad and the Kale salad and everyone tried the juice. It was surprising to see how many were hesitant to try the kale, but once they did, many came back for seconds! Thank you so much for yummy and healthy snack. Our favorites broke down to the following (a good preview for our data analysis unit we are beginning!): Mrs. Kesslar and Mrs. Redder continue to bring us neat and interesting creatures for our pond study. Today they brought us a toad that Mrs. Redder caught! We had a great discussion on the difference between a frog and a toad. And then why they are both still considered amphibians!
Congrats to our Battle of the Books Winners! Presley, Macey, and Brooke did an excellent job and scored GOLD at this years competitions, beating our student teams from the other schools. This is a lot of hard work as each student must read a minimum (although they often read more) of 4 novels in preparation and then are quizzed on the reading. Way to go girls! We also celebrated our students who worked super hard and earned 100% on their spell-a-thon this year. There are lots of hard words to learn and remember! Way to go Madeline, Macey, Connor, and Hanna (not pictured). Mrs. H-P stopped by to present them with their prize! Connor was also our top fundraiser for the spell-a-thon this year in 3K! He was recognized at our school wide assembly and won a movie gift bag that included admission and some movie treats! We also had the privllege of having Mrs. Wheeler, town of Drayton Valley counsellor, come in to read to us for Education week. The students love having someone else to listen to once in a while and the book (one in the series "And Then It Happened") was a hit! Thank you Mrs. Wheeler! Finally, a very special thank you and Happy Mother's Day to all the women in the children's lives who love and care for them. Whether you are their Moms, Aunts, Grandmas, Sisters, or Friends, you make a difference and should be celebrated this Sunday.
We spent today working on our gifts for our Moms but we don't want to share photos until after Sunday so we don't give away the surprise.
Fascination with our pond life, practicing our throwing and catching skills, daily math (notice we did we multiplying, division, polygons, 3D shapes, patterning, skip counting, ordering numbers, and sorting and naming groups- WHEW!), and then we also finished off our grade 7 pals' worksheets on Mr. Terupt in LA. A very mish-mash day!
Before we get to the end, let's see how we stretched our brains today! Look at all the concepts the kids covered just today in their daily math!
Students were given these two summaries: "Joey went to the zoo with his Mom but wandered off and got locked in overnight. After accidentally letting the snakes out and getting stuck in the polar bear enclosure, Joey was rescued by the night zookeeper and returned home." " Margaret was supposed to watch her younger brother, Mike, but she wanted to play with her video game and yelled at him to leave her alone. Later she finds that Mike has disappeared. After searching the house she looks in the woods and finds his favorite bear in a stream. After following the stream she finds Mike has fallen into a hole. She makes a ladder out of things she finds in the woods and gets him home just as her parents walk in the door." They then worked on using the skills they've been taught on how to create great endings. This includes adding:
Finally, we also finished up our joint novel study of the book "Because of Mr. Terupt" with our grade 7 pals in Edmonton! They put together stations for us to work through (just like the students in the book did!) with themes found in the book. We got together over Google Hangout as a group for them to give us the instructions and then we set off on our stations! It was an awesome way to end our novel study! Special thanks to Mrs. Jap of Londonderry Junior High for giving this a first go with us! And don't forget a little fun outside when we can!
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June 2015
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