I am sure you have heard that we have some new pets..a tailess whip scorpion, 2 halloween crabs and a millipede. We have also replenished our mealworm hotel with some new mealworms. Lots of life in the portable. Portables (or outdoor learning spaces as I like to refer to it) can be enriching and amazing learning environments!
In math, we moved from our 2D geometry focus on polygons into using that knowledge to better understand and investigate 3D geometry. We spent a great collaborative day with Mrs. DeRivera's class building various 3D shapes. Students used marshmallows, toothpicks, wooden skewers, straws and connectors, polydrons, paper nets among other things to build various 3D solids. From the building debrief, students came to the discovery of why we couldn't build anything beyond cubes and rectangular prisms with the straws and connectors which led to an amazing discussion where they brought in their understanding of angles and realized that our connectors have only 90 degree or right angles and therefore were limited to shapes that used only right angles. We were wishing that we had more variety in our connectors to include smaller (acute angles) and larger (obtuse) angles so that we could have built more elaborate solids. WOW! Great discovery. Students followed up that build day with a video series that each person created using Explain Everything to demonstrate their understanding of the properties of those 3D solids and also to compare different solids to each other. Pyramids and prisms were a BIG focus and we discovered that all pyramids that a certain number of triangle faces and all prisms have a certain number of rectangle faces. We even went as far as to discover how we can tell how many of each face there would be....hint....it has to do with the shape of the base! Ask your child about things like square based pyramids and hexagonal prisms....see what they can tell you.
This past month has also had us looking alot at data. We held many book club talks with our peers using amazing books that contained REAL data and REAL displays of data. These books were some favourites for the year among some of us....books about Endangered Animals, Recycling and Environmental issues.....all topics students are passionate and interested in. We developed criteria charts for what common features the various types of graphs we found all had in common. These are posted so that as we create our own displays we can ensure we have all of the same features. This led to some great investigations into ways we can display data and how we might decide which data would best be displayed in various ways. We then created many of our own bar graphs, pictographs and circle graphs. Grade three students focus was on carefully choosing a scale for a bar graph by looking at the size of the numbers that needed to be displayed as well as carefully choosing a key for a pictograph based on the numbers that needed to be represented. Grade two students were using one to one correspondence for most of their data. We developed criteria for great graphs and we created some amazing displays that were EASY TO READ and LOGICAL!
Running through our program has been a focus on multiplication strategies as well as telling time and using time data (elaspsed time). These will continue moving forward for the next while.
Our language program has been intertwined with social studies as we read, research, find main ideas and supporting details in text centred around our themes of Early Canadian Communities (aboriginal communities) in grade 3 and Features of Communities Around The World in grade 2. These may not sound interesting topics to you, however, students are loving them and look forward to delving into these topics deeper.
Our read aloud text has been The One and Only Ivan which has led to great discussions around animals in captivity. The book is told from Ivan's (a silverback gorilla) perspective and we have had fun learning to see things from various perspectives and our discussions center around what the zoo keeper's story may be about a particular situation in the story versus Ivan's perspective, versus one of the other animal characters. We decided there seems to be 3 categories of animals in captivity: animals kept in captivity for entertainment, animals kept in captivity for research and protection and animals kept in captivity for rescue and rehabilitation. Ivan, the main character from our novel, is an example of an animal in captivity for human entertainment. Hope and Winter, dolphins kept in captivity at the Clearwater Marine Aquarium in Florida is an example of an animal in captivity for rescue and rehabilitation. Go to www.seewinter.com for live webcam footage of Winter, Hope and Nicholas in Clearwater.
Students wrote amazing recounts of their trip to Crawford Lake and we have been publishing those up into student generated books. We are now looking for a way to display our student published books...we need a small bookshelf (and space to put it) so that we can continue to write, edit and publish other forms of writing. We will get to narratives, poetry, persuasive letters.....much fun to come in writing!
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