Harris- Grade 3 Ramsay

This week's April snowfall provided our grade 2/3 class with a wonderful opportunity to get outside and hopefully enjoy one last exposure to winter. Aside from having just good wholesome fun, they were tasked to create the tallest structure they could make out of snow. In the 15-minute building task as they tried to complete their structure,  I heard some great conversations and vocabulary such as the words;  stable, unstable, base, and foundation.  When the task was over, the students were given the challenge of finding a way to measure their structure using a non-standard form of measurement. Most of them decided their hand would be the best unit. The challenge then continued back in the classroom. The second task was to then convert their hand measurement into units of either unifex cubes ( grade 2) or centimetres ( grade 3) and measure and draw a structure that was the same height as their snow tower. What fun they had converting, adding and/or multiplying their units and creat

  If you have not yet heard of the adult game  Wordle , this is a great opportunity for your child to share with you a daily 5 minute phonics game that we have been enjoying.  Spellie  is a child version of Wordle and has proven to be such a great way to transition from lunch time recess to our afternoon learning. Playing  Spellie  has helped the students apply their knowledge of common vowel combinations, blends and digraphs. Many have requested that I include the link in our weekly blog so they can play at home. We discussed that if I send the link they won't do the daily Spellie before school in the morning as we all want to continue to work collaboratively to figure out the answer. If they also want an additional challenge, there is a child's version of the Wordle game as well. Have fun!!! Careful it can be addictive. https://spelliegame.com https://wordlegame.org We have also been working hard at completing our procedural writing booklets. It has been wonderful to see th

This week we started our wonderful residency with Three Left Feet. The students have done an amazing job keep the energy positive, giving it one- hundred percent and learning some fun choreography. We look forward to next week when we get to put the finishing touches on our performance.  In Science we started out new Rocks and Minerals unit. We used the opportunity while on our Community Walk to collect rocks to bring back into our classroom for further examination. Before we went on our search we discussed the simple joy of rocks, finding them, their feel, their color pallet, and how magical rocks can be. Each having its own history, its own journey, its own story. Like snowflakes, no two rocks are the same. But unlike snowflakes, rocks can be held, saved and collected. To continue to help inspire us prior to our search we enjoyed the teachings in the book Everybody Needs a Rock By Byrd Baylor.   The story outlines ten simple, but important rules to finding the perfect rock and inspir

This week in literacy we have been returning to creating a personal narrative. Our focus this week has been related to big watermelon idea versus little seed stories. The best personal narratives are little seed stories. Seed stories focus on a small moment. For example, big watermelon ideas are larger amounts of time, such as a trip to Calaway Park or a birthday party. It is from the watermelon ideas that are very broad that we are able to then focus on smaller more detailed seed story. Seed stories evolve when we zoom in on a very focused part of an event. For example, Instead of a trip to Calaway Park, one would write about the experience of taking a roller coaster ride for the first time. A birthday celebration would be narrowed down to when the cake arrives. After looking at a few examples and modelling a story together as a class we had lots of great examples from the students such as- A trip to Hawaii to an experience of finding a gecko in a bedroom, or instead of visiting Grand