Feb. 11 - Starting our Stable Structures / Pulleys and Gears Unit

This week, the Grade 3s in our class started the Strong and Stable Structures Unit (The Grade 4s will be beginning their work on Pulleys and Gears with Ms. B next week).

We started by looking at a picture and attempting to find out how many structures we could notice. We also circled them with green if they were stable or strong and red if they were not (unfortunately, these do not show up on the picture):

There was a bit of a debate in class regarding the man and his son and whether he was a structure or not. By looking at the other examples, we realized as a class that a structure is anything that can support something else (which we call a "load") - therefore, the man acts as a structure for his child!

Students were then given a challenge - using 20 spaghetti sticks, a metre of tape, and a handful of mini marshmallows, they were to work with a partner to make the highest structure they could. We'll be completing this at the start and the end of the unit to see if we can make a better design!

A lot of students noticed the triangles in the above picture and came up with their own designs that used triangles. Here are some of their designs:

Feb. 9 - Line of Symmetry

We continue our investigation into 2D Shapes this week by looking into lines of symmetry. We started by looking into lines of symmetry that we can find in our environment:

We then used a ruler as a line of symmetry to create our own designs that showed symmetry:

 

We'll be creating some art later this week that shows symmetry as well!

Feb. 8 - Spirit Week / Fractured Fairy Tales

Spirit Week / PD Day Friday
This week is Spirit Week! Please send in permission forms and money for the Tuesday trip bowling if  you have not yet already. Also, please note that this Friday is a PD Day so there is no school.

Our Spirit Day Activities are as follows:

Monday - Crazy Hair / Wacky Hat Dag + Little Ray's Repitles
Tuesday - Sports Day + Bowling
Wednesday - Superhero Day + Magician
Thursday - Wear Red or Pink or Both + Outdoor Fun Day

It's going to be a fun week!

Fractured Fairy Tales
We have been learning a bit about Fractured Fairy Tales in class and are just in the process of creating our own!
Fractured Fairy Tales share a lot of similarities to their original story but they often change an aspect in a key way. Here are some of the ways that they can be changed:

We have been reading some fractured fairy tales (The True Story of the 3 Little Pigs) and have seen some Youtube videos about them. 

As a class, we decided to make up our own ending to the classic Goldilocks and the 3 Bears, and added a not so happy after all ending. 

Students are either writing up and then drawing their fairy tales (Grade 4s) or creating Bitstrips about them (Grade 3s). 

Art catch-up!

I haven't posted some of the art that we have been working on in a while. Here's a bunch of the art that we have been working on in January with Ms. B!

Math / Art - In math, we created images using boxes in graph paper. Some students created their own designs while others decided to go for a neat 8-bit, old school video-game choice. They eventually replicated their work on the wall using post-it notes and found the area / perimeter of their work.

Monochromatic colour scene - Students did a great job with this piece, using darker tones on the outside and making the colour lighter as it went towards the middle. They then painted animals over it the following week. Here's our beautiful display board with them!

Textures - Students also learned about how to create different perceived textures in their drawing. Using crayons, they traced various design patterns and coloured over designs in the classroom. There were some very interesting choices used for texture (the agenda, the classroom speakers, and the "in" bin were all used).

Math - Geometry Start / Reviewing Right Angles

We have started a new unit in geometry! We started Tuesday with learning about the different ways that we can classify shapes.

We opened up with the following question:

From there, students recognized that we could sort them by their sides and points. We looked at six different types of families (triangle, quadrilateral, pentagon, hexagon, heptagon, and octagon!) along with a few common quadrilaterals.

Today we were learning all about angles inside shapes. Students worked with partners and went on an angle hunt in the classroom to find different types of angles. They needed to find at least 6 angles in total and 1/2 for each grouping. Here's what they found, differentiated by grade level: