Week of May 24th

Despite having a short week to recognize Victoria Day, our friends in Grade 2/3 have been busier than ever. In literacy, we have been working on our ability to focus on the important aspects of revising and editing our work. It is wonderful to see how their understanding has developed, knowing that the initial writing portion of any task is only one-third of the process. This week, they carefully followed a checklist to help guide us through what it means to revise. Our goal in revising is to understand and learn about the craft of writing. Grade two and three writers need to learn that rethinking and reworking a piece of writing is a normal part of the writing process. We discussed how revising helps us pay close attention to whether or not our writing meets the criteria we set out to achieve. It is also a time to think about word choices and sentence structure; this goes beyond fixing a misspelled word or putting in a period.  

Connecting to our literacy task, we also finished our illustrations accompanying our fractured fairy tales. Barbara Reid was the illustrator and author who inspired us with her award-winning artwork created with plasticine. Before making our pictures, the students took the time to create a foreground and background illustration to help prepare their ideas before working with the plasticine medium. Upon completing this project, we enjoyed sharing our story and our artwork with our Kindergarten buddies.



 

In math this week, Grade 3's started to learn about fractions. In this unit, we are introduced to fractions using paper folding. Beginning with unit fractions, we learned that the denominator in a fraction is the number of equal parts in the whole, and the numerator is the number of selected or shaded parts. We also learned how to write a fraction for the shaded region in a shape that has been divided into equal parts, and we shaded the equal parts for a given fraction.

Ms. Yasin's math group continued to practice counting coins this week. Students could use their double-digit addition and subtraction skills to now add and subtract monetary values! When counting, a helpful strategy for students was to start with counting the largest value coins and then adding on the smaller values. Money Bingo was the highlight of math this week! 



Our community walk provided us with wonderful opportunities to learn about bridges. We took the time to identify the type of bridges we could find along the elbow river and sketched them. We used our loose parts back in the classroom to recreate the bridges we saw. We also used materials found in nature to test our ability to build a structure that could balance and be stable. 







A fun new piece of equipment for our gym class!

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