February 4

Welcome to February!

January has come and gone and the learning continues in our classroom. Students are hard at work learning about nonfiction text features, how reading nonfiction differs from reading fiction, and more. We are being encouraged to explore nonfiction text both online and on paper. Miss Jeffries, our librarian, came in to teach us about an online database called Britannica School. It is a great way for students to research topics of their choosing. The articles can even read to the students! 

We’ve wrapped up our Social Studies unit on communities in Ontario and played a review game called “Quiz Quiz Trade” to help prepare us for our final test. 

Our Snowglobe stories are published and hanging on display in our classroom for all to admire. They are a fun read! We have such imaginative students in our room.

In math, we learned about movement on a grid along with cardinal directions (N,S,E,W) as well as directional turns (clockwise, counterclockwise, quarter turns, half turns).  Our current unit is all about measurement, including telling time! Stay tuned for another post about that.

Feel free to leave us a comment and ask us any questions about our learning.

We hope you all have a great day!Happy Groundhog Day Gif

 

 

November 19

Finished Science Projects

The classroom has been buzzing with the sounds of scissors cutting, markers marking, paintbrushes painting, and so on. Our science projects about sound are complete and the students have presented them not only to our own class, but also to 2 other classes who came to visit us and see our hard work!

We are proud of our work and how much we have learned about sound with this project.

Several students presented their guitars, one student presented about a harmonica he made, many taught us about how dolphins or bats communicate, and one student taught us about decibels and the loudness of sound. Great work, Gr.3s!

November 6

Science Project: Sound

Hi Grade 3s,

Some of you may have chosen to build a rubber band guitar or a harmonica.

Here are some videos you can use to help you design it. Don’t forget, you can watch these videos at school, too, on our class ipads. We will be doing all the work at school to make our projects come to life. You can research at home if you wish as well as bring in any materials you might need.  Mrs. Sullivan can provide things like paint, paint brushes, paper, and elastic bands.

If you are gathering research about how dolphins or bats emit sound or you’ve chosen to learn about decibels, a great search engine to start at is:

www.kiddle.co

https://kids.nationalgeographic.com/

 

 

November 2

Light & Sound Experiments

Our Light and Sound unit in Science is coming to a close, but along the way, we’ve experimented with:

  • Making sound waves visible
  • Making sound waves travel through string
  • Refraction
  • What does translucent, transparent, and opaque mean

We are now just beginning our own projects, specifically about sound. Stay tuned for the finished products!

May 20

Let’s Celebrate World Bee Day 2022

Today we celebrated World Bee Day by learning all about bees!

Turkey Jay, Mrs. Sullivan’s husband, is a beekeeper and loaned us many of his bee keeper tools and items so we could understand how bees produce honey and all that is involved in the process. 

 

 

 

wearing a beekeeper veil

We painted beehives (actually called ‘honey supers’) to make them prettier and played Kahoot to test our knowledge.

Bees are so important for many things, especially for pollination! Did you know that every 3rd spoonful of food depends on pollination? As bees move from flower to flower in search of nectar, they leave behind grains of pollen on the sticky surface, allowing plants to grow and produce food. 

In order to produce a kilogram of honey, a bee has to visit four million flowers and fly four times the distance around the planet.

Bees are critical to our survival. Did you know that there are more and more negative effects on the health of bees, which makes them increasingly endangered? We must take extra care of their survival.

Bees are such fascinating creatures.

What do YOU still wonder about bees?

 

 

May 1

Egg Drop Experiment

As a culminating task to our Science unit all about forces, we worked in teams to design and build and finally test a way to protect an egg from breaking. Much like a helmet will protect our heads from a fall, we had a similar task to ensure these precious eggs stayed in tact. We dropped the eggs from the top of our school and watched to see what would happen. Would our parachutes open?  Would our layers of protection actually work? Would our ideas play out the way we expected?

We discussed how we would ensure our tests were fair such as:

  • dropped from the same height
  • dropped on the same day
  • dropped in the same manner

In the several years of conducting this experiment, this would be the first time Mrs. Sullivan would have all student groups be successful in having their eggs stay in tact! Wow! How impressive!

Have a look at the experiments in action:

October 21

It’s a Food Chain!

As part of our Science unit all about habitats, we recently put together an aquatic food chain.

What’s a FOOD CHAIN?

  • A food chain shows how each living things gets its food. It’s a flow of energy.

 

What is Food Chain Definition and Examples | Read Biology

We had to match the descriptions to the animal and put them in the correct order. We have been learning about vocabulary such as producer, consumer, decomposer. These are important words to know when learning about a food chain. Check out some photos of us in action!

 

October 11

The Wonders of a Bog

Last week, we were privileged to invite some of the lovely members of the Upper Thames River Conservation Authority (UTRCA) into our classroom for a virtual field trip to the local bog.

As we are learning about habitats in our first Science unit, this was a perfect way to connect with a local environmentally significant area. 

 

We are looking at some of the captured creatures you can find in bog water samples. Can you spot the tadpole?

What’s a bog?

A bog is a wetland that accumulates peat, a deposit of dead plant material—often mosses, and in a majority of cases, sphagnum moss. It is one of the four main types of wetlands.

Fun Facts About a Bog:

  • It is nutrient-poor
  • It is highly acidic
  • the soil is spongy 
  • Bogs are formed from parts of glaciers melting over time

We prepared ourselves by watching a few learning videos introducing us to the bog and then we connected LIVE for a 30 minute session. If you’d like to watch the videos, here they are:

 

We learned so many different things! Here’s some of the topics or ideas covered in the 30 minutes we spent live with them:

  • biodiversity in the bog
  • carnivorous plants and animals that exist there
  • How does a bog help us?
  • How did the indigenous peoples use peat and sphagnum moss?
  • What is the life cycle of a bog? How did it begin?

Here’s some of the plants we learned about:

  • leatherleaf
  • bog cranberry
  • round-leafed sundew (this is a carnivorous plant!)
  • black spruce tree
  • Tamarack tree
  • sphagnum moss
  • Northern pitcher plant (this is a carnivorous plant!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

Our local bog called the Sifton Bog is not far. Perhaps you can visit it with your family! It’s such a beautiful place so close to home.

Have you ever visited a bog? What do you still wonder about?