Writing & Math Updates

Hi All,

Third term previews will be going home on Wednesday - keep your eyes peeled for them!

Next Thursday, we will be headed out on our field trip to 1001 Steps. I'm slightly short drivers, please let me know if you can help us out!

In the past two weeks, we've been spending more time on geometry. On Friday of last week, we started to build cubes using straws and pipe-cleaners. We discussed the various properties of the cube - edges, vertices, angles and faces. Today, we constructed a tetrahedron (triangular pyramid) with the same materials. In the last ten minutes of Math, we had a great time dipping our figures in soapy water to get "faces" and letting the wind blow bubbles for us.

Today, we put up our I Am poems. With Earth day being next week, the poems were written in order to advocate for the environment. We began last week with a picture book called the Great Kapok Tree. In the story, the various animals that were living off the Kapok tree spoke to a logger about why it was important to not cut down their tree. Please take a look at the pieces if you have time - it's quite evident that the children are quite passionate about this subject!

Hoping to speed through the Grade 3's unit on Structures (guess we didn't make it in time for the bridge building competition) and the Grade 4's unit on Sound and Light. On the bright side, our field trip has forced us to start looking at some of the learning outcomes in both grades' final units in Science :) We've been using a lot of the materials that Lynn (the guide and presenter at 1001 Steps) left us to use for reading comprehension and Science. 

Speaking of the reading comprehension, today, we went over finding the "big idea" and "supporting details" within a piece of text. We've been working informally on this concept since the fall and will be something we will continue to work on until the end of the year. The children will also begin to explicitly learn about inferencing as well - a difficult concept in reading, but something they are already doing within their own reading!

That's all for now!