What’s a food chain? How does energy flow from one thing to the next?
A food chain shows us how each living thing gets its food.
A fun game we played together in class today showed us how a food chain works and gave us a chance to make our own food chains in small groups. Give it a try! Click here to try it for yourself. (Make sure Adobe Flash is up to date).
Here is some vocabulary we’ve been exploring:
producers (make their own food, such as plants)
consumers (cannot make their own food, such as animals)
decomposers (break down food and eat dead plants and animals, such as bacteria, fungi, worms)
herbivores (plant eaters)
carnivores (meat eaters)
omnivores (both plant and meat eaters)
What type of eater are you?
Here is a short video about food chains and food webs.
Today, we launched our first science unit called Habitats.We began with a nature walk in our school’s own backyard. We were paying close attention to the sounds we were hearing all around us. In addition, we were looking very closely at our surroundings, noticing the small things and big things, the colours, textures, and so on. We made sketches, wrote down observations, and asked questions.
Habitat: A habitat is a special place where a plant or animal lives.
Turkey Jay, Mrs. Sullivan’s husband, is a bee-keeper ‘on the side’. He just loves bees and enjoys sharing his knowledge with others. There’s always so much to learn about bees. They truly are an incredible insect and are not to be feared.
He couldn’t visit with us today, so he sent me with some of his bee-keeping tools and gadgets to share with my students.
We watched some cool videos, learning a little bit about bees, including their waggle dance!
Students loved painting their designs on the bee boxes and Turkey Jay can’t wait to use these homes for the bees this summer! The bees will be happy and are thankful for beautifying their homes!
Here are 10 Fun Facts about Bees that
maybe you didn’t know:
1. There are 3 categories of honey bees: the males (drones), the females are the worker bees, and the queen
2. The only purpose of the male bees is to mate with the queen
3. In the Fall, the female bees kick out the drones from the hive because they are not needed over the winter time.
4. Drone bees do not have stinger
5. The queen bee has a bigger abdomen than the other bees
6. The queen lays 1500 eggs each day. It takes 21 days for the eggs to hatch.
7. When the queen lays an egg, she chooses to fertilize it or not. A non-fertilized egg turns into a drone (male bee). A fertilized egg turns into a worker bee (female).
8. The honey bee is the only insect in the world that makes food that we eat
9. Honey bees produce many things including propolys which is like a glue that bees use to seal cracks and secures things. If a mouse dies in the hive, the bees cannot drag it out, so they entomb the mouse in propolys so the dead body does not contaminate the hive. Smart!
10.Bees don’t sleep. Ever! They are not dormant in the winter. Their wings beat together and they produce heat this way.
What an incredible job that the grade 3s did on their Social Studies Early Communities dioramas. I was so amazed by the level of detail in many of the projects. Wow! We enjoyed sharing our hard work with a few other primary classes as well, teaching them about our chosen community from early Canada.
As part of our recent Science unit all about Forces and Motion, students recently were given a design challenge and needed to work collaboratively to solve the following problem:
Problem: A local sports store, “Eggsactly Sports”, is needing new ideas to help improve their line of protective gear such as helmets. They are looking to young, innovative kids to help design inexpensive protection that could inspire the store to make new gear.
Solution: Design safety equipment that will protect your egg from a drop of at least 3 m.
Each group’s design was innovative and well thought out. I was SO impressed! Students used a variety of materials some of which included:
cotton balls
tin foil
a cushion
balloons
Kleenex
Kleenex box
parachute
paper roll
styrofoam
We recruited some help from Mrs. Chapman to be the “tester” and with Mr. Ritchie involved as well, each team’s design was dropped from the roof of the school to the pavement below.
Students looked on anxiously to see what happened as a result. Did the eggsurvive the fall? Did the design function the way it was intended?
Take a look at the collection of 5 videos from all teams along with some pictures:
In class, we watched the videos to reflect on what we noticed or heard with each drop. They were asked to think about what they would change or keep the same if they had to do it again. Was our prediction accurate?
Three out of the 5 groups did not have their egg break. There was 1 eggbroken and 1 was cracked.
Overall, we had fun building and testing our designs!
If you were to do this experiment, what type of materials
What a special treat this morning as students came in to class, sat on the carpet, and listened to a short, live presentation with Dr. Jane Goodall!
Dr. Jane Goodall is a scientist and conservationist. She is 85 years young and spends much of her time, as she says, in hotels and airports, flying around the world promoting wildlife conservation and empowering people to make a difference in the world. Check out her website here.
Her skype session was public to all students and classrooms anywhere in the world and we were registered as one of those classes.
We learned a little bit about her extensive work with chimpanzees, which started in the 1960s. She answered questions from kids around the world. We added our own questions and followed along with dialogue happening in the moment. We even got to do a selfie with Dr. Jane! Students will go home with a certificate on Wednesday!
Jane urges students to find small ways to make a big difference in the world. She talked about her own program called Roots & Shoots which you can learn about here.
It’s been amazingly cold outside this past week. It’s been so cold that we’ve had indoor recesses because it’s quite dangerous to stay outside too long. Brrr!
Take a look at this video I made several years ago (before my name change!) when school was cancelled because of extreme temperatures (and probably lots of snow).
What do you think about it? Leave me a comment and tell me!
There’s certainly never a dull moment in Grade 3. We work hard, do our best, and try to have fun at the same time.
Below, students are playing “Quiz, Quiz, Trade” to review for our Social Studies test coming up. Students could use their notes, if needed. They coached each other if they weren’t sure of the answers and then traded cards once each student successfully finished each card.
Here, students are reviewing subtraction by taking turns coaching each other through the step-by-step process. They did such a fantastic job!
Check out this awesome tutorial by one of our classmates!
As a culminating project to our Rocks & Minerals unit, students worked hard to research a famous rock structure of their choosing.
The students chose to research the following structures:
Zuma Rock (Africa)
The White Desert (Egypt)
Giant’s Causeway (Ireland)
Flowerpot Island (Tobermory, Ontario Canada)
Ayers Rock (Australia)
Twelve Apostles (Australia)
The Wave (Arizona, U.S.A)
There are so many beautiful rock structures in our own country and around the world. Congratulations to the two young ladies who won the National Geographic Kids contest for best pamphlet! Sylvia Jane from California was so pleased to meet you and present your awards!
All projects were proudly displayed at our Parent Conference Night and students took them home to share their hard work with their families. Bravo Grade 3s!
There’s never a dull moment in our class! We’ve been so engaged in all aspects of our day–French, Math, Science and more. We enjoy working in different teams, sharing our strengths and gifts, nibbling on treats, learning about all sorts of things. Check us out!
