Week of October 10th

We have been participating in the Building with Materials and Testing Materials and Design unit in Science. This week we had a lot of fun participating in the marshmallow challenge. This was a team-building activity in which teams must try to build the tallest free-standing structure out of 20 sticks of spaghetti, one meter of tape, one meter of string and one marshmallow. This task emphasized group communication, leadership dynamics, collaboration and problem-solving. Despite being successful or not, all the students learned from the experience, and our discussion afterwards helped us review the concept of building a structure with a wide base and why a triangle shape is often used. We discussed that the triangle is the strongest shape, has a strong base and can provide immense support. We saw that some of the world's most famous architectural designs, like the Eiffel Tower, Great Pyramids and the Louvre Pyramid use the support of triangles to make beautiful and durable structures. 





This week in Literacy, we started our Bill Peet Author study. Bill Peet was a famous American Children's Author who wrote over 30 books for children and spent 27 years making animated films for Walt Disney. We are using the book the Wump World to discuss and implement the Fab Four reading comprehension strategies of predicting, clarifying, questioning and summarizing. Over the next week, students will work in groups to use the Fab Four strategies on their own chosen book by Bill Peet. While discussing the career of Bill Peet, it also became evident that our class is very interested in the history of animation and how this form of storytelling has developed over time. 

In Math, we have begun to look at fact families and how our understanding of fact families can help us to understand that a missing quantity in a sum, difference ( gr.3) or product ( gr. 4) can be represented in a variety of different ways. 




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