Author: fmellenthin

This week has been busy with scientific experiments (amongst other things!) We are almost finished our plants module and are ready to jump right into soil investigations (You would be amazed at home interesting and intriguing soil can be!) We will also be starting to look into structures and beginning to build.

We started with examining our  bean seed to see if they had sprouted or not – our guiding question was ‘Do seeds need soil to germinate?’. Some students had beans that had sprouted and some not yet. We questioned why that could have happened, answers ranged from how much light, how much water even the quality of the bean. We used magnifying lenses to inspect the seed and what had sprouted.

Students then replanted their bean sprout to see what happens next. They have the responsibility of keeping their plant alive and ensuring it has everything it needs. Once our beans have produced stalk, we will begin our Structures module and get ready to build a self sufficient watering device (get ready for the post about bringing in as many clean recycled items as you can… your garbage recycling team will be happy… The corner of my classroom… not so much!)

The next experiment involved looking into the stalk make up of a celery plant. The celery plant is different to other plants and we looked in to how its stem and cell make up was different. The experiment used our knowledge of a plants water needs. We added food colouring to the water and will be documenting what happens to the stem and the leaves.

-UPDATE-

Our food colouring has reached the edges of the Celery plant!

Hello Grade 3 and Grade 3 parents,

It has been a few weeks since I posted an update of what been happening the Grade 3 classroom. So we started the week as Scientists…by Wednesday we were Data analysts and by Friday we were Google Docs experts (almost!)

Our current science module on Plants is ‘growing’ well! We investigated what happens to plants outside in the Fall season. We took our clipboards and magnifying glasses to the school garden and used our knowledge on photosynthesis to see why some plants were slowly turning into compost.

After, we started out bean plant experiment, our guiding question was ‘Do plants need soil to sprout?’. New scientific vocabulary was introduced when we built a hypothesis and added our procedure. We are currently documenting out bean growth and will update you on whether our hypothesis was correct.

We started a new module in Math : Data management. Building on our Math homework of looking into the language of math, we were introduced to new words such as; classify and interpret. We will be learning about collecting data and how to display the data through; Venn diagrams, Tally, pictograms, bar charts and double bar charts. Eventually we will bring our data to a conclusion and interpret what it means.

Structured Word Inquiry is in full flow in our classroom. We have been sorting and classifying prefix, base and suffix to build new and old words alike. We have also started our etymology research into where the prefix, base and suffix have originated from.

Our blogging challenge this week is linked to images online and what we can and cannot use with and without permission. Sites such as unsplash are excellent because copyright permission has been given and we are free to use. We also received our login  details to our school google accounts. We will be starting to explore google docs and google slides. We will be continuing our ‘personal interest projects’ but in a google doc so you can view from home all the amazing work.

November is also going to be our Grade 3 Kindness Month. We will be continuing to speak about kindness and what small things we can do to help each other out and brightening each others days as the greyness of November sets in! Watch this space for how Grade 3 will spread kindness throughout OJCS!

Week 2 of the Blogging Challenge came with the focus of commenting. As a class, we discussed what a comment is, why is commenting important (or is it not important?), what comment can give (to the author of the blog), what is it’s purpose?

We also looked into the negative aspects of commenting and opened up a conversation around ‘trolling’. This part of the commenting learning curve will be re-visited through our digital footprint workshop with Miss Brigitte.

Here are the Grade 3’s in action, creating their first written comments on the class paper blogs. The next step for the class will be to review the comments as we open up the next part of the conversation around quality comments and the creation of our class commenting rules: