We have had a very exciting week in G3.1 this week! Andy Chua, the author of the Fossil Finders visited our school and shared his knowledge of dinosaurs and some of his personal collection of fossils with the kids. They were completely blown away by what he shared! In addition to that, the G3.1 students had a mystery reader on Friday. Here is what one of the students have to say about it. Mollie: We got notes that had clues on them. Some were picture clues and some were riddles. In my group, my first clue took us to the nurse's room where we found another clue. The second clue was a picture of a can and some teenagers and we realised that can + the teens made canteen so we went there and found another envelope which had another clue which took us to the library. All the other groups also had clues that took them to the library. We looked in the library and saw Ms Skrtic and so we asked her if she has an envelope. She didn't but we understood that she was our secret reader! This was a lot of fun because we worked together and we looked around the school for clues which were fun to solve. I'd like to do this another time. The students had a great time dressing up as crayons from The Day the Crayons Quit. It's a class favourite! The parents made a great effort getting the clothing sorted out for the day while we made hats and placards in class. Thank you to the parents who were able to share photos from the day. You can see some of them below.
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Our UOI on How We Express Ourselves finished with the Grade 3 concert. The concert was titled Kaleidoscope as it featured a huge variety of art! There was singing, dancing, paintings, poetry and of course recorder playing. The students are very proud of themselves and they received many compliments from their peers and staff on how well they did. This week we began to create our own anthologies. We've written a number of poems over the last couple of weeks and decided to publish them. At the moment, we're working on a first draft of the anthologies.
In math, we have continued our work on multiplication. Today we completed our chart on all the multiplication strategies we know and reflected on them to decide which one we felt the most comfortable using. We then picked one that we would like to learn next and began to inquire into this strategy. We'll continue this next week and once we think we understand the strategy, we will have to prove that we do to Miss Amin! In UOI, we have begun to look at our second line of inquiry, 'how technological advances have affected expression'. We inquired into musical terminology and are going to create our own soundscapes using a musical platform. The G3 concert went extremely well and the children had a great time! All their hard work has paid off. They have put so much effort into researching, rehearsing and performing that I'm sure they're all going to need a rest this weekend! Pictures will be up soon so watch this space. As our UOI is focusing on how we express ourselves, we've been finding lots of ways to do this. Following on from last week's 'I Am' poems, we began to look further into poetry techniques as well as how different cultures express themselves through poetry. We started off with creating our own made up words for nonsense poems, using 4 words repeated in different ways to create poems and playing with the structure of sentences from books and turning them into poems. Then,we began looking at Haiku poems which originate from Japan and focus on nature and the seasons. We wrote haiku poems with partners before writing individual poems and were given pictures of various scenes to write about. In preparation for our concert, we began to research The Black Nag which is a traditional English folk dance. We've also been comparing it to dances from different cultures to see if there are any similarities or differences. The dances the children chose to compare it to are: Chinese Dance Line Dancing Ballet Dragon Dance (Traditional CNY dance) Shishi-Mai (A Japanese lion dace) As I write this, the children are currently taking part in a drama workshop. They're learning how we use our bodies as a tool to express ourselves and are having a lot of fun with it! The main focus is learning how to improvise which is a very useful skill to learn, especially with our performance coming up next week! Today they've been working on freeze frames, poses to show different emotions, facial expressions and making the most of the space around them. We can't wait to see what the second half brings tomorrow!
Here is what some of the students had to say about the workshop so far: Learnt about tessellations, begun our new math unit on multiplication and division, written our own poems AND begun some artwork for our concert! Writing As part of our unit, we have begun to learn about poetry from different cultures. We've had a look at Haiku and Pathya Vat and next week we will begin to write our own! We've also had a look at Black Out Poetry and 'I Am' poems. The children have written their own 'I Am' poems and I have learnt so much more about them as they wrote about their thoughts, curiosities, worries and dreams. These poems will all be on display soon so come and have a look! If you can't wait till then, the children did type these up and they are saved on their drives so please feel free to ask them to share the poems with you. I'm sure they will be very happy to do so! Math
At the start of this week, we finished off our work in shape by looking at tessellating patterns. We looked at regular tessellations and irregular tessellations and the children began by making their own with shapes. They then drew their own tessellations on paper. Although, their finished work looks very complicated, there were only a few rules to follow to make sure the shapes tessellated. These will be up on portfolios shortly so keep an eye out for them. In one of the photos below, you can see two children who successfully completed a round of describing shapes. One child had an image of shapes which the other child was not allowed to see. Using all the vocabulary learnt at the end of last semester and in the last week, the student then had to describe it to their partner who had to draw it on their whiteboard. It taught us how important it it is to use the right language not only in math but in any situation, so that we can ensure people understand exactly what we mean! Hi everyone! Welcome back to our blog. We've had a wonderful break and had lots of funny and exciting stories to share with our friends last week. We are also welcoming two new students to our class. Our Grade 3 Concert will be taking place at 3.00pm on Friday 2nd February at Serangoon Hall. All are welcome. We look forward to seeing you there. UOI Our new UOI is How We Express Ourselves. We are looking into how 'the tools we use affect how we express our ideas'. Last week we started off by unscrambling our central idea and drawing and writing what we thought it meant. We then spent some time breaking down the words in our lines of inquiry. We used dictionaries, people and the internet to find out what the key words in our lines of inquiry mean so that we can truly understand them. Our lines of inquiry are: - Artistic expression in different cultures - How technological advances have affected expression Math In math, we are continuing our work on shape. We have learnt lots of new vocabulary such as congruency, similar, regular, irregular, flips, turns and rotation. We used geoboards to create shapes in order to show our knowledge of the vocabulary and then we went on a symmetry hunt around school. This week we have moved on to tessellation. In class we began by using shapes to figure out which ones tessellate and which ones don't. Some of us made patterns using the same shape but flipped or turned them in order to make the shapes fit together. -Written by Arwyn When we were doing the debate we had to research about the invention we picked. You could either work in partners or work in a group and find research about the inventions one at a time. We watched videos we read on websites like wikipedia or just searched on google. We also interviewed miss Amin, miss Noreen and ms Merium, A debate is when you research with a group or with partners about two inventions that you picked than on the day someone tells you that you are on the proposition for example and your other partner is on the opposition team. There were three debate groups the first debate group had Teddy, Eniko, Aiden and Arwyn. Second group had Mollie, Grace, Tanisha and Ruthu.Third group had Joyce, Minzhe, Gordon and Aubrey. We learned how to do a real debate. We all enjoyed it because it was challenging. This is when Nina, Hizuki and Hisaki shared their report about the telephone.I learnt that the old telephone was black and had numbers.I enjoyed it because they spoke loudly and clearly. - Grace This video is when we did a invention of telephone in ESL class and share the report. I be nervous but when I speak,that was fun. and Nina and Hizuki did good job. Connecting our UOI and math together, today we introduced the following terms: Decade Century Millenium The children had a go at writing what they thought these words meant. We had some interesting responses and there were some good connections with other words. Some children thought it meant something is rotten because it sounded like the word decayed. Another child thought it meant 10 years because a decagon is a 10-sided shape. The class worked in pairs to research the words and they used dictionaries and the internet. They fed back what they had learnt and the general consensus was the following: Below are some photos of our completed timeline! Can you see some of the connections that the class made to the inventions and these new words on their pink post-it notes? Some of the students were surprised by the dates of some inventions and they wrote those down onto the orange post-it notes. This week we have been getting ready for our summative task and we've been very busy indeed! The children will be working in teams to debate one of the following statements: - Electricity is more useful than the toilet. - Smartphones have had more of an impact on the world than glasses. - Smartphones are a more useful invention than the aeroplane. They worked in groups to come up with these statements themselves and are working together to research the pros and cons of their inventions. They've been busy interviewing teachers, family members and using books and the internet to gather their information. In order to get us ready for presenting our debates, we've been watching some examples on Youtube and extracting common features to create our own debate guidelines and we've also begun to have mock debates. We started off with debating the statement: Students must wear school uniform. They were split into two teams and given 5 minutes to come up with their arguments. They did very well with presenting their views, we heard lots of interesting points and some excellent rebuttals. Next week the class will debate against Ms Noreen and myself and we are all very excited about it! A while ago, we collected tins and painted them. We use these tins as pencil cases. A few weeks ago, I brought in a box to store each table's tins and whiteboards in but it was too small! I asked the children to help me figure out a way for us to collect the right sized boxes. Below is how Grace's group approached this. In this lesson we were measuring the white bored to see if our can pencil organisers will fit on them so that we knew what size our box should be. I worked with teddy. I enjoyed it because I made a clean up crew were we keep our tables clean and we make tidying fun. I learnt how you can tidy up using mesurement .In the second picture we are measuring the carpet to fined the perimeter. We also did this with the oblong desk and our cubbys .When Idid this with mollie I learnt how to find the perimeter. - Written by Grace we were designing a patio for MS.Amin and it had to have the perimeter of 100 meters. i worked with Hisaki and Arwyn. i learned that 100 meters can make new shapes i also learned that you can count different skip counting to make 100. i really enjoyed this because it was fun to do different shapes and mesure up the perimeter of it. Written by Mollie In the picture below, we made shapes with four tetrominoes. We manage to make five different shapes with the four tetrominoes. Then we learned that if you turn the shape around it is still the same shape. I liked when we made the shapes and figuring out how many we can make! - Written by Tanisha |
Hello!We are a group of 8 and 9 year olds who are kind, fun and imaginative! Archives
March 2018
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