Harris- Grade 3 Ramsay

 Hello Everyone, I want to begin by thanking all of the families who were able to join us for our open house on Friday afternoon. It was lovely to see some parents I have not yet met in person and to showcase all of the great work that has been unfolding in room 8 since the beginning of September. If you did not get a chance to connect and would like to, please drop me an email, and we can arrange a time to chat. This week we had our soccer residency; this was an excellent time for our students to develop their soccer skills further and learn many aspects of the game. This opportunity also proved to be a great chance for us to continue to develop our skills as a class to focus on the importance of teamwork and communication. In addition, we learned the value of playing a game to have fun without emphasizing the winner. In literacy, we created a poem showcasing "me". We reviewed the importance of adding adjectives to describe nouns and using words to express personal character...

We had a wonderful week in Room 8. In literacy, we have started to discuss how to improve our writing skills to include more detail and how to entertain our audience. To help support this process, we discussed a watermelon versus a seed story or the concept of exploding the moment. We will be working on this skill throughout the year as we improve our writing skills. As an introductory lesson, it was impressive to see the level of writing that already exists.  In math this week, we introduced the concept of finding the area of a 2-D dimensional shape. The grade 3's learned how to use a cm grid and count the number of grids in an area, and the grade 4's applied their knowledge of multiplication by using the formula area= Length x width. Both grades also learned and reviewed their knowledge of measurement. We practiced measuring common classroom items to the nearest centimetre and then introduced measuring in millimetres.  https://youtu.be/XzhKc6jD0ws   Our class is very ex...

Every week room 8 will be starting with a sharing circle. This is a wonderful time to connect as a group, get to know each other better, and set some of our learning intentions for the week. We will also use the last 15 minutes every Friday to reflect on our week by discussing our new learning objectives and addressing any challenges we face as a collaborative learning community.  Some of the weekly student comments will be posted in red. "I like how we learned idioms because it is fun to talk to our parents, use and learn this silly vocabulary." "I learned what idioms are and what the definition of some of them are and I learned a few new ones. " "I loved it when we we drew a picture to go with the idioms so that we could explain what they meant."  Our week started with a beautifully illustrated novel that a student brought in. " Monkey Business" by Wallace Edwards is a book with a collection of elaborate, off-beat illustrations that feature ani...

 Hello and welcome to our weekly grade 3/4 blog. Our blog will be a wonderful place to share the learning happening in our classroom. As a class, we will determine what we would like to share and make every effort to include the voice of our students.  For our first two days, we spent a lot of time getting to know each other and started the task of creating a classroom environment where everyone is honoured and appreciated for the gifts and talents they bring. Writing activities and icebreaker games were used to introduce the importance of communicating, cooperating and collaborating.  This year during the lunch hour, our class will go outside for recess before eating. This will be a bit of an adjustment for our class. It will be helpful to support your child if they can have a good hearty snack that we will be eating at 10:15. Please also ensure that your child brings a water bottle every day as they will be coming home on a daily basis to be washed and refilled.  I...

Dear Families,  I just wanted to wish everyone a safe and happy summer. I hope you all get some great family time together, and many adventures await you!! Thank you all for making this such a fantastic year. It has been an honour and a privilege teaching your children. They are all such a creative and inquisitive bunch, and I feel so fortunate to have spent time getting to know them.  See you in the fall!  Smiles, Sabine Harris 

 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...