May 8th - 12th

Hello everyone,

I hope you had an amazing week and a wonderful Mother's Day!  Here is the week in review for 3D.

Spelling was based on synonyms.  This week will be as well.  I hope everyone has had a chance to study for the quiz.

In Math, we continued to have our daily challenges which can relate to any strand of Math. Our regular Math lessons this week continued to be focused on multiplication and division.  We will continue to work with these skills and will be beginning to look at points on a grid later this week.

Bridge design has been our focus in science.  How can we make them both strong and stable with very limited materials to build with?  Our plans are complete and we will be continuing with the build during the week.

We continue to look at following and deconstructing procedures as we encounter them across the curriculum.  However, we are now beginning to write our own narratives and have been thinking about how we can best "hook" our readers.



In Art, we focused on our Moms.  We hope you enjoyed receiving our portraits, in their frames, as much as we enjoyed creating them for you!

We will be working with the Scientists in School scientist on Friday.  I will be contacting those of you who indicated that you might be able to volunteer early this week.  We need a minimum of four volunteers for each of the classes for this particular set of experiments, so if you have your criminal record check and are available either Thursday or Friday we would greatly appreciate your help!

Have a wonderful week!
Ms. Sparling

May 1st - 5th

Hi everyone,

I hope you all had a great week and are not too waterlogged!



We started our week with our spelling quiz, as we will again tomorrow.  Our words for tomorrow are: daze/days, him/hymn, hoarse/horse, feat/feet and tale/tail.  Students will need to know both the spelling and the meaning to be able to choose which spelling is the correct one for each sentence in the quiz.  This week's words will be synonyms: two different words with the same or similar meanings.



In addition to the spelling words, we read "They're on Their Vacation There" this week and practiced choosing the correct form of those homophones.  After reading "Punctuation Goes on Vacation", we worked together to determine where the punctuation should go.  We have also continued to read our novel and discuss the choices the characters make and what that tells us about their character traits.



In Science, we started the week by completing a "Mystery Science" task about what makes for a strong and stable bridge.  Additionally, we watched the "The Magic School Bus: Under Construction" to help us determine how to make the strongest paper bridge's possible.  Partners created various bridge designs and tested them out.  They then presented their strongest bridge to the class.  From those ten bridges they have begun to analyze the weight held and determine which two bridges they believe were the most strong and stable.






Thank you to everyone who helped their student to get their famous structure research in.  We are still waiting for a few students to complete their research before we start developing our scripts for our presentations.














Our focuses in math this week have been understanding different ways to represent fractions and representing/explaining division.  We have also continued to review other areas of math through our daily challenges.

Thank you so much to all our families who participated in the Education Week activities.  It was wonderful to see families out walking to school and to have visitors join us for our in-school Open House morning.   I hope some of you were able to attend the Kindergarten and/or Mrs. Tersch's concerts.  They received great reviews.

Just a reminder that the forms and money for Scientists in the School are due this coming Friday.  Please let us know if you are able and interested in volunteering one or both of the days.  We will also require a lot of newspaper, so if you subscribe to one and could send it in when you are finished with it, it would be greatly appreciated!

Have a great week!
Ms. Sparling

April 24th - 28th

Hi everyone,

I hope you had a great week.

We started the week off with our spelling quiz, as we will be doing again this week.  Hopefully everyone had a chance to study our first set of homophones.  Remember that you will have to listen carefully to each sentence to make sure that you write down the correct word during the quiz.  We will be continuing with more homophones this coming week.

We also enjoyed our final four book reviews.  L.S. presented a Marvel story collection to us, focusing on The Hulk.  B.M. introduced us to "Dogman".   His novel and H.K.'s novel from the "Captain Underpants" series share the same author, Dav Pilkey.  J. H. shared "Here Comes Trouble" with the group.  He recommends it to people who enjoy funny and interesting stories, with cool characters.

In Art, we reflected on what we noticed about Norval Morrisseau's choice of subject and his use of black compared to our own.

We have begun our study of strong and stable structures.  We have read texts about building igloos and analyzed the procedure as written.  We have completed experiments testing the stability of various heights of towers and what happens if we add weight to the base.  We have read about and explored the strength of triangles in comparison to quadrilaterals.  Every student has also chosen a famous structure to research.  The research is due this Thursday, May 4th.  The research will be used in class to create a script and presentation about the structure chosen.

With Ms. Powell, we revisited our question about comparing fractions of a set.  We also explored how we could add fractions with two different denominators (e.g., 1/3 and 1/4).  We investigated and played with probability games, and then created our own.  Both of these lead to discussions about division and so we have begun to explore that topic.  We will continue to go more in-depth with division this week.

Special events last week included our opportunity to participate in the community clean up.  We focused on the area around the garden, cleaning up lots of litter between the stones and the fence.  Friday was our Eldorado Excellence Awards assembly for April.  The themes were Autism Awareness and Responsibility.  Congratulations to our award winners, H.I. and J.H. and to T.J, J.T. and A.T for presenting our puzzle piece in the video.

We are looking forward to this coming week.  It is Education Week!  This year's theme is  #weinspirehope.  Special events include our school's participation in Music Monday on Monday.  Tuesday, May 2nd is Walk to School Day. You are welcome to join the walk at any point along the route.  This will be followed by our Open House.  Open House  is an opportunity for you to come in and join our class for the first period of school (8:15-9:15).  Thursday evening is the Canada Concert.  While our class is not participating in this concert (as we were part of the Christmas event) we do have a couple of students in the choir, who will be performing that evening.  The Volunteer Tea is being held on Friday, May 5th.  This is the staff and students' opportunity to say "Thank you!" to all of you who help so much with making Eldorado the amazing place it is!

Have an amazing week!
Ms. Sparling

  

April 18th-21st

Hello everyone,

I hope you have had a wonderful week!  All of us in 3D were busy as usual.





We began our week with spelling as we always do.  Students were working on words with the prefix "mag" or "mega".  This week we will be moving on to homophones; words that sound the same but have a different meaning and spelling.  The students will really have to be listening carefully to the sentences for the context so that they choose the correct words during the quiz.






In Language, we wrote our short persuasive pieces about which animal best represents us.  You will have seen those pieces on Seesaw or at the Arts Night.  They were attached to our art work, completed in the style of Norval Morrisseau.  This week we will be reflecting on various pieces of Morrisseau's art work and our interpretation of his style in our own pieces.















We enjoyed two more book reviews.  T.J. presented "Rebound Time".  She was able to really target specific people in the class who she felt might enjoy based on their personal interests.  A.A. present "Star Wars: The Phantom Menace".  He had researched his book on-line and was able to share many details of the text with the class.  We are looking forward to our final four book reviews this week.

Fractions continued to be our primary focus in Math.  We have looked at fractions of a whole and fractions of a set.  This week we will be applying some of this knowledge as we look at probability.

Our novel is "The One and Only Ivan".  We have just met Ruby, as she joins the group at the Big Top Mall.

In Science, we have begun to read about and investigate strong and stable structures.  This week we will be participating in a number of experiments to help us better understand some of the concepts we have been reading about.  These experiments will also provide us an opportunity to deconstruct a series of procedures before we begin to write our own. Linked to our Science studies, students will also be coming home with a research paper template so that they can investigate a famous structure of their choice.  They will be using this research, in class, to create a script for their presentation.

This Friday will be our Eldorado Excellence Assembly.  The theme of the month is responsibility.

Have a great week,
Ms. Sparling

April 10th-13th

Hi everyone,

I hope you have been enjoying this lovely long weekend.  I loved getting to spend time with my family and friends, as well as taking advantage of the lovely weather (even Saturday was warm, with the rain).

In the week that just past, we acknowledged the Day of Pink by reading stories about different kinds of families and talking about how everyone has the right to be themselves and be loved for who they are.  Each student in the class filled in their own gingerbread person outline with symbols, words and images that they felt represented them.  The figures were then passed around the class and every class member wrote down one thing that they really like or appreciate about that child.  These are now displayed in the classroom for everyone to see how amazing each and every member of class 3D is.  I have also posted a picture of each child's figure to their individual Seesaw account so that you can enjoy them as well.

We continued with the idea of identity and choosing representations of ourselves by looking at the meaning that various First Nations associate with different animals.  Each student in the class has chosen an animal that they believe best represents themselves and will be writing a persuasive paragraph to convince us of their choice.  Once their writing is complete they will have a chance to make a representation of the animal using art techniques based on the works of Norval Morrisseau.  He is one of Canada's best know Native artists.





To prepare for this activity we have continued to read and deconstruct other pieces of persuasive writing, with a focus on providing proof/details/examples to support our arguments.







In Math, there was a continued focus on fractions.  As well as our daily Math Challenge.

In Spelling, we focused on the prefix "dis".  The spelling quiz will be first thing tomorrow morning.

We also enjoyed four more book reviews. K.N. shared "Finley Flowers" about about good friends and the issue of bullying.  A.S. told us about Ronald Dalh's book, "George's Marvellous Medicine". He felt that it was a great book that was funny and full of surprises.  J.S. presented "Old School", one of the Diary of a Wimpy Kid books.  He recommends readers who enjoy comedy try out this series.  A.T. presented "Ghost".  He blew everyone away with his well organized and presented slide show of his review.  We learned a lot about the book, Day of the Dead and C.P.  We are looking forward to our next four reviews!

Don't forget that the days of the cycle have once again shifted.  We will have gym tomorrow (Tuesday) and Thursday.  Library is on Wednesday and Music is Thursday and Friday.

Enjoy the last of your long weekend!
Ms. Sparling