News for May 24

News for May 24

This week the grade 3 students worked hard to review for the EQAO test next week. The test will be in six parts, one part in the morning and one part in the afternoon, each day for 3 days. All of the grade 3's in the school will write the test in Room 5. The Room 5 grade 4 students will go to Room 4
(Ms. Kam) during the testing periods.

The caterpillars are growing! Most of them have tripled in size.Many have gone into the next stage, which is the chrysalis. These are now hanging from the ceiling in our butterfly house. The children wrote their observations, drew diagrams and thought about what was happening inside the chrysalis, as the caterpillar transforms into a butterfly inside the chrysalis. They each wrote he/her hypothesis down to compare later with research information.

In math, the class continued the unit on probability. They learned the game "PIG" which uses two dice and the goal is to roll the dice, tally the amount of points and the first person to get to 100 (or over) is the winner. But, if a "1" is rolled you loose your turn and if "1+1" is rolled you lose all your points so far. Then the children analyzed the possible outcomes when rolling two dice (there are 36 different outcomes) and figured out the possibility of rolling a "1" (11 out of 36) and the possibility of rolling "1+1" (1 out of 36). During out computer time the students visited this site to play probability games:

http://www.free-training-tutorial.com/probability-games.html

We finished reading the biography of Jim Henson, the inventor of the muppets. As a complement to this story the children watched a documentary (a movie version of a biography) of Kevin Clash, the artist who is the voice and puppeteer of the famous Elmo muppet. It was clear from both stories that these men each had a dream from when they were young and worked very hard to make their dreams come true.

As part of the pioneer unit, students learned about planting seeds. They learned about what plants need to grow in their environment. In the field of a farm, the pioneers could not rely on every seed to grow. The probability of a seed growing to maturity was about 1 in 4. They used a  poem to help them remember:

"One for wind, one for crow, one to rot and one to grow."

The class learned how to dye wool. Traditionally, pioneers would use fruit and vegetables to colour their wool, but we used Kool-aid. The students also learned how the pioneers used vinegar, salt or urine to "fix" the colour so that it would not wash out. The children will use this dyed wool in a variety of future projects in our pioneer unit.

The students also learned about how to design experiments to prove that water, air, warmth and light are needed for a plant to grow. So, the students had some beans with water, some in the fridge (no warmth), some with too much water (no air) and some in a sealed metal tin (no light). By the end of the week the seeds had begun to germinate (sprout).

The students began planning our 100+ Books Party (Friday, June 22 at 9:00 AM - families are welcome to attend!) They each chose a book from the books read aloud this year. They all began to write a book report based on the chosen book.