A fraction is a part of a whole. If Mrs. Sullivan chops an apple into 4 equal pieces to share with her friends, each person will be 1/4 of the apple.

As we explore and understand fractions, as part of our warm up, I invite several students to volunteer and stand at the front of the room. I then proceed with a question about fractions.

Today’s question was, “With the students at the front, what am I thinking that shows the fraction 3/4?

There were many great guesses including…

• 3/4 of the students are wearing blue tops.
• 3/4 of the students have long sleeves

While those guesses are true, they weren’t the “rule” I was thinking of.

Can you guess my rule? Look carefully!

When we began our measurement unit, students brainstormed many things that we can measure some of which included:

• time
• distance
• speed
• length
• width
• height
• depth
• mass
• volume
• temperature

What other things can we add to our list?

The metric system uses units such as meter, liter, and gram to measure length, liquid volume, and mass. The metric system is based on 10s, and some of the different measures for length include kilometer, meter, centimeter, and millimeter. Notice that the word “meter” is part of all of these units.

Did you know that there is only 3 countries in the world that have not adopted the metric system. These include the US, Myanmar, and Liberia.

Armed with rulers, meter sticks, and measuring tape, students were busy measuring various items around the class today. We even learned about something called circumference when we had to measure the distance around our heads!

Check out these busy bees!

Check out this video that we watched in class. You may find yourself singing along!

Math is all around us. Whenever we go to the grocery store, the mall, see gas prices, travel distances to go somewhere, check the time, share a pizza, make cookies, there is no denying that we’re applying math concepts. Over the last little while, our students have been busy applying math concepts in order to go shopping with $10.00. They also had to figure out what change they’d receive. Using flyers and play money is a fun way to learn!

How many ways can you make $1.00 with Canadian coins? Today we had some great discussion around Canadian currency…how colourful it is, what other forms of payment can someone use? when is cash necessary? what are the bills made of? what images are on our coins? why do we not use pennies? and much more.

Did you know that Canada has 2 mints–one in Winnipeg and one in Ottawa?

• The mint in Winnipeg produces every single Canadian circulation coin— literally billions each year. It was established in 1976.
• The Ottawa facility produces hand-crafted collector and commemorative coins, gold bullion coins, medals and medallions. This is where the master tooling is done to create the dies that strike coin designs for both circulation and commemorative issues.

Click here to learn a little bit more about Canadian money.

Students worked together in their teams to come up with as many ways as possible to make $1.00.

As part of our 2D geometry unit, we’ve been learning about symmetry. We’ve been challenged with determining if various shapes such as a parallelogram, 5-pointed star, square, rectangle, pentagon, have lines of symmetry. If so, how many?

Line symmetry occurs when you can flip or reflect one half of an image onto itself and it fits exactly. We see a lot of symmetry in nature, too! Have a look at these images and see if you can find symmetry within them:

There are different kinds of symmetry, but in grade 3 we look specifically at line symmetry. As students move into older grades, they will look at rotational symmetry, too.

One of the tools we can use to help us check for line symmetry is a Mira. Check out the students below investigating symmetry during independent work.