Week 6 Update

 October 16, 2020

Dear Parents,

For a short week, we accomplished quite a lot! This week, we began learning about the reading skill of visualizing, learning about 3D shapes in math, and made some structures (you may have seen these come home) in science. 

In language, we began learning about visualizing when we read. This simply means trying to “see” what we are reading. Kind of like watching a movie in your head as you read. This is much easier with fiction than with nonfiction, but is definitely a skill that can be used for both types of text. Here is a short video we watched that explains what visualizing is. 

In writing, we started our final written piece for descriptive writing. For this piece, I asked students to imagine that they had gone to heaven. They were then asked to describe what Heaven or God might be like. As always with descriptive writing, we encourage students to describe using vivid adjectives, big grade 3 sentences (using joining words) and using all the 5 senses. Our next form of writing will be procedural writing. This form of writing is essentially giving instructions. Great examples of procedural text are things like cookbooks (recipes) and instruction manuals. We only touch on this form lightly in grade 3, so we will likely only be doing a few samples of procedural writing. Next week, we will write about how to carve a pumpkin! At home, you can help your child practice reading procedural texts by looking at things like recipes, or having them assist you with a recipe, if you wish. 

In math, we are learning about 3D shapes. This week we built some 3D shapes using toothpicks and marshmallows, and then we investigated all the properties of those shapes such as how many faces, edges and vertices they each had. One thing that I try to emphasize is the difference between pyramids and prisms. I tell students that pyramids are always named by the shape at the bottom, and they always come to a point. Also, they are joined by congruent triangles. So, a pyramid with a pentagon at the bottom would be called a pentagonal pyramid, and would have 5 congruent triangles coming to a point at the top. A Prism, on the other hand, is also defined by the bases BUT there are 2 of them, and they are exactly the same at each end. The two shapes at the ends are always connected by rectangles. Children often have difficulty identifying the differences between the two types of 3D shapes, so we will have been practicing this quite a bit this week, and will continue next week as well. Here are some photos of the shapes we built in class:

In Science, we are continuing to learn about structures. Next week we will be sending home a project about researching a famous structure. This project will be completed at home, but students will do an oral presentation at school. I will send more details next week. 

This week, we learned about how to make structures stronger by using triangles to stiffen shapes. First we made a cube out of straws and tape, and put some books on one that I made. Mine only held 5 books! I then asked students to try to strengthen their own structures to see if they could beat mine. Students did an amazing job! After students reinforced their structures, we tested a few, and found that a number of the cubes were now able to hold 40 books! They probably could have held more, but they were getting too tippy at that point. Amazing! Here are some photos of our cubes:

Finally, in Health we began learning about healthy eating by learning about where our food comes from and the difference between processed and unprocessed foods. 

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend. As always, if you have any questions or would like to discuss your child’s progress, please feel free to contact me any time. 

Yours,

Chris Pouliot