Harris- Grade 3 Ramsay

 Our whole last week was packed with wonderful learning experiences! We had beautiful weather on our field trip to the Inglewood Bird Sanctuary. Thank you to our volunteers who kindly joined us! We had a great time learning about the specific habitat at the Sanctuary and the incredibly diverse population of birds, mammals and insects found in the grasslands, forest, water and riparian. Time was also spent learning about pollinating insects and their vital role in our ecosystem. One specific pollinating insect that was particularly fascinating was the leaf cutter bee. These amazing bees cut leaves to construct nests in cavities (mostly in rotting wood) and create multiple cells in the nest, each with a single large and pollen for the larva to eat. Leaf cutting bees are important pollinators of wildflowers, fruits, vegetables and other crops. We also learned about many other common insects, their lifecycle and their adaptations.  Our afternoon was spent walking through this wond...

 This week has been busy! We have been working on many wonderful learning tasks to help represent a variety of learning outcomes. For example, in Math, the grade two and three classes have discovered the joy of playing board games and creating one. This week, their task has been to design a math board game that, when played, helps practice a concept we have learned this year from numbers sense, pattern and relations, shape and space or statistics. Before starting, we shared our experience about the qualities that make a good board game. The suggestions were wonderful and helped establish the quality of work we strive for.   We look forward to finishing our games and playing them in class this week.  This student even applied his learning as it relates to 3-D nets and decided to create his own dice from a cube net. Way to go!!!  In physical education this week I introduced the students to a game that I used to love to play as a child called Jumpsies. It was a real hit...

 This week we spent time writing our last full story of the year. We have been learning to create a story based on a visual prompt. The students did a wonderful job predicting who would the character or characters be in the story, where would it take place, how did the character find himself in the current situation, what problem occurred, how does the predicament resolve itself and lastly, what is life like for the character once the problem has resolved. We are also learning the benefits of sharing our story with a peer and paying close attention to revising and editing our written work.  Our picture prompt! This week, we had a lovely time on our community walk, looking for invertebrate animals. We were fortunate to find several examples of invertebrates in various stages in their lifecycle. Our exploration was overshadowed by the excitement to see that the crayfish had now come out of hibernation and were back in full force, crawling along the bottom of the river! The stude...

A big thank you to all of our volunteers who joined us at the zoo on Wednesday. The students had a wonderful time enjoying the wonderful weather and appreciating the animals. Our learning and research will continue in the classroom as we discover more about a specific animal chosen from the North American Wild exhibit. While at the zoo, each group was responsible for learning about their preferred animal habitat, life cycle, lifespan, diet, adaptations and any other interesting facts.  In science this week, we were introduced to the principles of geology and archaeology by excavating a cookie. This cookie excavation helped the students understand how important it is to be careful while excavating fragile artifacts. They also learned how an excavation can destroy a site and why recording the location of artifacts is crucial to preserving archaeological knowledge. The chocolate chips served as the artifacts in this activity, while the cookie served as the archaeological site. We lear...

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 finish...

We had a lovely week with lots of variety of activities. To start our new Science unit, testing designs and materials, we used a stem challenge to see if we could discover what type of bridges we could create that would be the strongest using one piece of paper. After many attempts, we performed tests to compare the different bridge designs and determine which one could support the most weight. Our second challenge using an index card was determining which shape, an arch or a square is most robust and holds the most mass. Finally, on our community walk, we took the time to look at the bridge on MacDonald avenue and sketch it. Many students observed the use of many beams and triangles in the structure and concluded that a triangle must be solid and help make the bridge more secure. Sketches from our journal as we closely observed our trees on our community walk as they slowly get their leaves and blossoms.  In literacy, we have returned our attention to story writing. Our task was t...

In literacy this week we continued to develop our writing skill as it relates to the art of persuasion. To begin with we discussed what it mean to "persuade". To help teach persuasive writing the story " I wanna Iguana" and "I wanna new room" by Karen Kaufman Orloff  was a great place to start. These stories are a series of letters between a mother and father and their son. In his letters the son is trying hard to convince his mom to let him get a pet iguana and his dad to let him have his own room. In the end, both parents have great counter arguments against his reasons but the boy's reasons prevail and a compromise is made.  After reading the stories we talked about the specific techniques that the little boy used to persuade his parents such as humor, appealing to his parents emotions and using logical reasoning. We also talked about what makes a good argument. As a class we then brainstormed some topics that we felt would be important to us to try...