The great day has arrived!!! We will be doing Pumpkin Math tomorrow! Just a reminder that students will need an old shirt to wear over their uniforms.
We are still looking for some hammers (at least 5), old cookie cutters and some parent volunteers if anyone is interested in coming in.
Should be a great day! Hope to see you there.
Just to clarify the Pumpkin Day Activities. They will be help in the morning starting at around 9:15 and going until lunch. You are welcome to stay for lunch with your child as well. We will not be carving faces into pumpkins but will instead be carving a variety of polygon patterns into the pumpkins using the cookie cutters.
Thanks for the help already offered.
It has been a busy few weeks and I have lots to share with you. I will have the spelling up tomorrow. Students also got our memory verse for the week. I will be doing both the spelling test and the memory verse on Monday. With all these short weeks, it has been hard to get our spelling and memory verses in, which is why we will be doing the Spelling test and memory verse on Monday.
On Wednesday, Nov. 2, the Grade 3 class will be celebrating the 5th annual Pumpkin Day. Each year our class gets out the pumpkins and the workshirts and gets to work subjecting our pumpkins to some good ol’ math fun. We will be weighing, measuring, carving, counting and much more with our pumpkins.
We would love for you to join us if you can. I am looking for some volunteers to help lead the groups in the various types of activities. If you can help us out that would be great! Just post a comment on the blog or send me an email! You can also talk to me before or after class.
The students will need some old shirts to wear. I am also looking for some old cookie cutters that you don’t want anymore or are willing to donate. We will also need at least 5 hammers which will be returned. I promise! 🙂
While you are waiting, try out this fun activity!
Just a reminder about skating tomorrow. We will be leaving at 12:30 and arriving back at around 2:45. Any parent help would be wonderful! Stay tuned for more exciting announcements!
Good afternoon,
We have had another outbreak of lice in the school and in the class. Lice can be particularly difficult to get rid of and require time and diligence to make sure that we keep lice outbreaks from re-occurring.
Please carefully check your child tonight for lice. It will require more than just a casual check. Please check through each section of your child’s head, slowly moving from front to back and side to side. If you think about the amount of hair you would fit between two fingers as if you were going to cut it, that is about the same amount you should be sifting through as you search your child’s hair.
Please also have a conversation about how to try to keep your child from getting in contact with their friend’s hair.
With diligence and carefulness, we can hopefully get rid of this visitor.
Today was an amazing day for the Hancock Building Inc. company. After doing the experiment about cylindrical pillars, we saw how they are used in the real world.
Venice is a city entirely built on cylindrical pillars which were driven into the mud. Some are from the year 7 A.D when the city was initially created on a series of low shallow islands in a lagoon of the coast of Italy. These pillars were gradually built on and added to to create the city that is now Venice! Isn’t that amazing! An entire city built on pillars of wood! Today the city is slowly sinking as the pillars sink into the mud and the tides carry silt and the sea floor away. But the pillars themselves are still strong and have survived because of the strength of the shape of the pillars. In the pictures below you can see some examples of the wood pillars with the brink built on top of it.
It is an amazing and beautiful city. Here is another image of the city showing the whole thing from ground up.
Here are a couple of videos that we watched showing Venice and how it works.
Venice Backstage. How does Venice work? from Insula spa on Vimeo.
It really fit nicely into our look at the strength of cylindrical pillars and how they are used in real life!
In our endless question for building perfection, the class continued our study of our Big Question:
How do we construct a building that is safe and sturdy?
We were studying what shape of pillar would hold the most mass. Our choices were the cylindrical pillar, the triangular pillar and the rectangular pillar. Having done our hypothesis and made sure that the experiment was a fair test, we stacked dictionaries on top of the pillars until they collapsed. You can see the results below!
AS you heard in the video, the cylindrical pillar will hold the most weight because it has no corners. The weight of the books is distributed evenly throughout the pillar allowing it to hold more weight than the other shapes.
Great fun. Tomorrow we will investigate how this relates to real life and see how one of the great cities in the world, Venice, uses cylindrical pillars to hold up an entire city!
So, in Science we have been working on our Building Unit. Students are working on the Big Question:
How do we build structures that are sturdy and safe?
To start off with, students created a building company which we named, Hancock Building Inc. As an end project, students chose to build a two car garage, a water tower or a bridge. As we work through a series of experiments designed to help us work basic building skills and concepts, students are relating their results back to, and using the concepts learned to think about, how to make their big project sturdy and safe.
So far we have learned that arch shapes, with the proper support, are stronger than rectangular shapes. We also learned that box girder beams are a very strong type of beam though we have to make sure that our tests are fair so that our results are accurate.
For tomorrow, I have a challenge for students to think about. Below are pictures of three different pillars. Pillars are like beams in that they are pieces of concrete, wood or metal used to support mass. However, unlike a beam, a pillar is vertical or up and down.
Take a look at the three pillars below:
Which pillar will hold the most dictionaries before collapsing? Why?
You can send me a comment on the blog by clicking on the comment button below! Let’s hear what you think!
Here is the spelling list and links to Spelling City!
Spelling M 2
Here is the link to Spelling City! Remember! If you practice and get 100% on the Spelling City Quiz, bring in your certificate or get your parents to write it in the planner and you can receive an extra point on your spelling test!
Tomorrow is our first skating time and the Grade 3 class is very excited. I just wanted to remind everyone that it is casual dress and that students need to bring their helmets in order to be allowed on the ice.
Should be a great day and if there are any parents available to help out, that would be great! As much as I enjoy blistered hands, it is so much nicer to have help!