A little late on these but here they are.

The Spelling List!

Spelling N 6

Here is the link to the Spelling City for this week. Remember, if you bring in your certificate with 100% on it, you can get an extra mark on your spelling this week!!!

We have been working on our Math Problems of the Day and today we have three to display!!! M.M, D.W and N.G all did a Math Problem using the Artpad.art.com website. Here are their results and how they worked out the problem.

D.W came up with the solution this problem: A telephone company charges 50 cents for the first 3 minutes of a phone call and 10 cents for every minute after. A 4 minute phone call will cost 60 cents. How much will a 15 minute call cost?

N.G. came up with the solution to this problem:

A soccer game is 75 minutes long. If the game starts at 11:25, at what time does it finish?

Our memory verse for this week comes from Psalm 37:1-2:

Do not fret because of evil men or be envious of those who do wrong; for like the grass they will soon wither, like green plants they will soon die away.

Have a great week!

Tomorrow is the last day of school for this week. Today was a busy day. Students are continuing to write amazing paragraphs with ly words, becauses and who/which to add interest to their writing. In social, today students worked on “grid maps” to reinforce that concept. We have also finished up multiplying by 10’s and 100’s. We have completed the times tables now and will be having a times tables test later on next week. Students can be practicing their times tables up to the ten times tables. We will soon be multiplying multiple digits which can always be a little confusing to students as it not only takes a knowledge of the times tables but also a little organization to make sure the numbers all line up properly.

As you can see, I have added a massive graphic to the side which gives an interesting, yet, humourous look at our atmosphere and the space beyond. A little tongue in cheek, but lots of fun.

In math today, we also did a problem of the day. Later on in April, students will be participating in an International Math Contest hosted by a group called Mathmatica. To prepare, we take one problem from past tests and work on them as a class. One student gets to display their solution using artpad.com. Today’s problem was a tricky one. You can see it in the solution presented by one of the students in our class, D.B.

Lot’s happening today. We started our home reading program today with an introduction and explanations. The students had lots of questions of course, so we spent some time dealing with that.

One thing I would like to mention out of those discussions is when the students need to start reading chapter books. Up to 70 books, students may read any kind of literature including chapter books. After 70 books though, students must be read chapter books. A couple of the students asked about comic books and magazines. I said yes to those as long as they are actually reading the material. However, I will also leave that to your discretion as to whether you, as a parent, will allow those materials to count.

As mentioned before, you can print off more reading log pages from the website here, either from the earlier post or from the box.net widget on the side.

Today we also completed our next experiment for science. I took some video of the event. Though the students were a little loud, the experiment went well and got some good information from the experiement to help us with our understanding of building principles. I will be posting more details and some of the videos soon to share with you.

Tomorrow is a special day in Math. We are going to be getting a little mucky. Please remember to have your child bring an old shirt to school.

Friday is Fall Colour Day. Students will be allowed to wear casual pants and shirts with fall colours.

Here is a new picture with lots of good words and ideas. We hope you like it everybody!!!

From the Grade 3 Class

P.S> We are doing this right now at Highroad in the class.

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

We had some fun today with a new website. The site is called PicLits. It is a neat site where you can add descriptive words and phrases to a picture. You can see the example below.

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

It’s great for Language Arts. We did a couple as a class and suggested that they may want to add some to our blog. However, they will only be able to add a link not the actual picture. Anyway, I thought I would try a step by step to do this:

1. Go to PicLits.
2. Sign in. Students can use the same user name and password as the one I gave them for Animoto.
3. Students create their picture with words.
4. When you are done, click on the word save.
5. Then click on the button for “blog or share” which is on the right hand side of the picture under the save.
6. Highlight and copy the link in the first box by clicking the mouse and dragging it over the words in the box. Make sure you have them all! When it is all highlighted, click on the right mouse button and choose save or go to the top of the screen and click “Edit” -> “copy”.
7. Go to our class blog.
8. On the most recent post, click on the “Post a Comment”
9. Type in your message like normal than “paste” in the link by right clicking with your mouse and choosing paste or got to the top of your screen, click on “Edit”->”Paste”.
10. Click submit and wait for me to approve it
11. And You’re done!

Have fun making your piclits! I will look at any of the ones done and maybe paste them into a post so we can all see them!

Well, we were back at it this week with lots of exciting things happening. Today we started looking at converting our outlines into paragraphs and the students were very excited to see the difference between what they started with and the paragraph we ended up with. The second paragraph was much more interesting with more details and interesting words being used. We also talked a great deal about how scientists developed their Mars Rover using the same ideas and procedures as we did when we looked at Oobleck. The students were amazed to discover that they had been doing the very same things that scientists did when they went to build the Mars rover. We watched some cool videos on the Mars Rover development and what happened when it went to Mars. We did a lot of talking about all the thinks scientists had to consider without even really knowing what the surface of Mars was like. Here is one of the videos that we watched.

Here is the spelling listspelling-l-32 for this week:

Reminder: Class pictures tomorrow! Please have your children come dressed in full dress uniforms!!!!

It was a busy day today and the students got quite a bit done. We are just about done working on our outlines and will be getting ready to turn them back into stories. The student have really picked up the idea of writing outlines and should be able to make an easy transition to writing paragraphs from those outlines.

In Art, we are working on creating pictures out of horizontal lines, diagonal lines and vertical lines. While it may seem that it would be hard to do an interesting piece of art out of just lines, I think the art will be amazing.

We reached a milestone the other day! We have gone past 2,000 visitors on our blog! We were all very excited and we are now trying to reach 3,000 by the end of the year.

Just a reminder! Students have their spelling test and memory verse tomorrow. Please help the students prepare for those!

Here is a game for you to try that looks like fun.

3D Maze – Play Now! Prepare a plastic bag near you before playing this game…

Found this site today that I might use with my students for Language Arts. It’s called PicLits and it allows you to use word lists to add titles to pictures. It might be neat as the words are in categories according to nouns, adjectives, etc. It was quite easy to use though I don’t like the ads on the side but that’s also a teachable moment. Here’s the one I made:

See the full PicLit at PicLits.com

Well, unfortunately I was not able to put the spelling words on the blog yesterday as it was a pretty busy day. I was telling the students that right now my after school time is taken up with choir as we are practicing for our concerts this weekend. We are doing a series of Southern Spirituals. It should be really good. Our concerts are Friday night and Saturday night starting at 7:00 at the Bakerview Mennonite Church in Abbotsford if anyone is in the area.

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Anyway, here are the spelling words this week:mark arrow

blood front

wonder dairy

note death

cause bridge

court fair

smoke full

tire mean

check except

till thus

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Well, I hope you all had a wonderful Spring Break. My wife and I enjoyed our time together and especially enjoyed our trip to New York. All the sights and sounds! It was amazing! If you ever have a chance to go, take it! New York is an amazing city and very safe. My wife and I went to a lot of galleries and art museums. We also saw three shows including The Little Mermaid. Here are some excerpts:

In class today, we started our look at fractions relating the use of fractions to scores on tests and pieces of pie. The students are picking it up very quickly which I am pleased to see. In social today, we did a quick review of aboriginal communities in B.C. We will be adding the aboriginal community that is local to our map of the physical features of British Columbia. One of the questions we will be asking is why they think our local aboriginal group decided to settle in this area of the province.

We will be starting our new unit on space tomorrow with a little quiz to find out what students already know about the solar system. It should be very interesting to see the information the students have already learned and synthesized about this unit. It will also be interesting to see what misconceptions about the universe the students have. I think it will be a great unit, especially with all the great interactive materials for the smartboard that are available.

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Here is the spelling list for this week:cheap cheerfulhonest freshcheap    cheerful

honest fresh

rough wise

wide plain

actual sure

dependent delight

future choice

least young

pair faith

always steal

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Finally, I showed this video to the students this morning and they got a huge kick out of it. I won’t give the secret away (and kids, if you are watching this with your parents, don’t tell them the secret either).This is what some kids experience in class all the time! How do we teach our kids to focus amongst all the distractions of life?