February 18-22

We had such a great week! The highlight was being able to attend the Oil Kings game together on Friday night. We had so much fun and as an added bonus - the Oil Kings won! 

I would like to send out a big thank you to the generous sponsors of the Edmonton Oilers Reading, Give it a Shot incentive program for providing the students with their free tickets.

Also, thank you so much to all of the parents who attended the game. I greatly appreciated all of your help.

The students had a great time on Friday afternoon rotating through four different "wellness" activities throughout the school. During "healthy snack making" the students learned the differences between fruits and vegetables and how to identify them. They also had an opportunity to make a fruit parfait and have a vegetable and dip snack. Please ask your child what four activities they participated in.

Curriculum Update

This past week the students were introduced to the book “The Frank Show” by David Mackintosh. In the story a boy is asked to by his teacher interview a member of his family. He chooses to interview Grandpa Frank, although he thinks Frank is a bit boring. But it turns out, as he gets to know him better, there is more to Grandpa Frank than meets the eye. The boy learns that his Grandpa is actually a really cool guy.

Using “The Frank Show” as a mentor text, the students were taught how come up with good interview questions that draw out important information. Then they were given a friend in the class to interview. The students asked each other four questions, made jot notes to record the answers, and then they put these answers into complete sentences sentences.

Spell-a-thon

We spent some more class time preparing for the spell-a-thon test this week. The students enjoyed working on a word search to find their spelling words.

They also had the opportunity to use Spelling City to prepare for the test.

 

I am so proud of each and every student for all of the hard work they put into practicing their Spell-a-thon words. Everyone did an amazing job. Way to go 3A!

Handwriting

We continue to work on our cursive writing in class.

Math

 We continued to work on our multiplication skills this week. The students learned to do the following:

• describe situations with equal groups as repeated addition and as multiplication. 
• describe multiplication sentences as the total number of objects in a set of equal groups. 
• draw pictures of equal groups to model multiplication. 
• solve simple multiplication word problems involving equal groups. 
• create a problem for a given multiplication. 

Science

Survivor Challenge: Great job building the backpacks out of tree bark!  While searching for food, we came across a source of fresh drinking water. We decided to head back to the plane to find containers to store the fresh water in.  However, the fresh water supply is limited , so we need to test the bottles to determine which will be the best to store our water safely.  The shape of the container will affect its stability.

Testable Question:  Will all shapes of containers be equally stable?

Using five different shapes and sizes of containers, the students tested which would be the most stable.  The students discovered that the size of the base affects the stability of the container.  As well the taller the container is the wider the base needs to be for stability.

We also tested the strength of difference methods of joining. The first challenge the students faced was to answer the testable question "Will straw cubes, joined with different connectors, support the same mass?" The connectors used to answer this question were paper clips, pipe cleaners and plasticine. The students concluded that cubes joined with plasticine where stronger and held more mass that those made with paper clips or pipe cleaners.

PE

We focused on soccer skills this week in PE.

Congratulations to our Student of the Week!