Harris- Grade 3 Ramsay

This week in Literacy, we worked hard to complete our wonderful stories based on the movie Snack Attack. We have been learning and appreciating the importance of the editing process and understanding that editing our work will often take as much time as it does to write our stories. We have also been learning to appreciate the feedback we can provide our peers by pairing up and doing a peer edit. Learning how to reflect on our work and appreciate our strengths and areas of growth will be essential as we develop our writing skills. We also spent this week learning how to write a biography by determining what is important to include in a biography and placing the information into three paragraphs.  In mathematics, we will begin to introduce division. To conclude our Multiplication unit, we had fun playing several games that helped solidify our basic facts up to 9x9. I have included the games on our google classroom and a great trick to support our ability to memorize our nine times t...

  In math this week, the students spent time gaining more confidence with multiplication facts and applications. We also learned how to apply our multiplication skills when searching for a perimeter of a shape. We were reminded that the perimeter is the distance around a shape, and the length is measured in units such as meters or centimetres. Therefore, we can use multiplication instead of repeated addition when the perimeter sides are the same. In geometry, we reviewed the names of 2-D shapes and created images. We used these images to locate and identify the number of 90-degree angles our pictures contained. In literacy, we had lots of fun using the short wordless animation film "Snack Attack" to create our short stories. The video tells the story of an old lady and her intention to eat some snacks (cookies). The short movie touch on a sequence of quite compelling themes: Understanding elderly people. Judging someone based on their appearance. Looking and stereotyping them...

This week in literacy we explored the importance of having a strong beginning of a story to capture our audiences attention. We explored a variety of fictional books and record which story beginning we liked. We discovered that the beginning of a story sets the tone for everything that will happen next. An opener is like an appetizer, offering a reader a glimpse into what is to come. several of the strategies we explore were to: begin with an action or dialogue, ask a question, describe the setting, provide some background information or have the main character introduce him or herself.  In Math, we have learned how to write a multiplication sentence and model multiplication as equal groups. In doing so we have also built on our understanding the connection between multiplication and repeated addition. This week the students learned how to model multiplication using arrays. Through the use of arrays we were also able to explain what the commutative property of multiplication is i.e...

This week was our last week together as a grade 3/4 class. Despite the change in our classroom makeup we had lots of conversations about how to keep our community and friendships strong and how resilient we can be. We will miss the grade 4's and their wonderful contributions to our classroom environment.  To end our week, we were busy finishing many tasks that our grade 3/4 class had started. In our Waste and Our World unit, the students were challenged to develop a cartoon for a consumer product that indicates the source materials, final product, its use and method of disposal. With a partner, they also created a poster that can identify actions that individuals and groups can take to minimize waste production, recycle or reuse waste and ensure the safe handling and disposal of waste. In class, we also looked closely at the text features of a non-fiction book and understood how these features support our ability to gather information. We learned to identify and find examples of th...