Harris- Grade 3 Ramsay

This week we were so excited to finally have the weather cooperate and allow us to get out and participate in a community walk. Thank you so much to the three parents who could join us and make our walk possible. I would love to schedule more walks in the New Year, so if you can join us on any Wednesday afternoon, I will try to recruit another parent or two so we can go.  This week we completed our hearing and sound unit. While on our walk, we applied our learning as it relates to echolocation by playing a game called Bat and Moth.  The students also took some time to enjoy their sit spot. This is a wonderful time to tune into nature by spending time outdoors sitting in quiet awareness or focusing on natural objects and perhaps "seeing" it and its remarkable details for the first time with some effort. During our sit spot time, the students choose a place outdoors that appeals to them. We will visit this spot repeatedly throughout the school year to observe the natural world....

Dec 9th In literacy, we completed our first fictional piece of writing this week. We continued to develop our editing skills with a focus on sentence structure. We discussed that every sentence needs to be a complete thought. We learned to avoid creating a fragment sentence by ensuring that our sentences contain a  subject  (person, place, or thing) and a  verb  (what the subject is doing) for it to make sense. We also reviewed that a simple sentence must begin with a capital letter and end with a period, question mark, or exclamation mark. To support our phonological awareness, we have also reviewed long and short vowel “a” and “e” combinations related to the vowel teams ai,ay,ey,ei and ea,ee,ie and ey. This week we will focus our writing on personal narratives.  Jen Aranyi, a graphic designer who makes beautiful water colour pen and ink paintings was the artist who inspired our art lesson this week. We explored the concept of "wet on wet" painting which ...

In Math, we have been reviewing the place value system for reading and writing numbers by distinguishing between the place values of a digit in one-, two-, three and four-digit number and learning the value of each digit. In addition, we have been reading and writing three- and four-digit numbers using words and numerals and understanding the connection between number words, expanded form, and base ten block representations. In this unit, we have also been comparing three-digit numbers using the symbols < and > with base ten blocks and using place value.  To build on our number sense, we have been regrouping to write numbers as sums of ones, tens, hundreds and thousands in different ways. Having reviewed and developed a stronger sense of numbers and place value, we have now begun to add two, three and four-digit numbers involving the regrouping of ones as tens, tens as hundreds and hundreds as thousands using base ten models and the standard algorithm. In the next two weeks, ...