Pajama Day - March 14

Spelling Words! (Week of March. 9)

 Spelling List A (March 7 – 14)

water	fault	talk	also	fall
vault	walk	haunt	auto	aunt

 

Spelling List B (March 7 – 14)

because	walked	audio	fraud	chalk
father	always	pause	talking	sauce

 

Spelling List C (March 7 – 14)

almost	August	although	author	autumn
sauna	waterfall	launch	default	laundry

 

This week's them is the 'aw' sound, in particular the ways it is created using a single 'a', or the vowel team 'au'.

Good luck!

Friday, March 7

 Hi parents,

We had a fun day today but also did some good work. It was "DJ Day" for last week's "table of the month", so they got to put in song requests all day. There was a lot of singing. I've somehow become really out of touch with pop music because I only knew about half the songs...

The spelling quiz went well, but unfortunately I didn't have a chance to mark them yet.

We spent a good chunk of the work period working on dinosaur paragraphs, and then the students used K-Nex to build their own levers. We learned how to position of a fulcrum affects the work needed to lift objects using a lever.

As you may have heard, it looks like conferences will be online again this year. Please stay tuned for details and book your conference as soon as you can!

Also stay tuned for next week's spelling words, and have a nice weekend!

Zac

Thursday, March 6

 Hi parents,

We had a good day today! The highlight was the work students did on their dinosaur paragraph good copies. 

For our first research-based informative writing task of the year, the quality of work greatly exceeds my expectations. I thought we'd have to spend a lot more time to get to where we're at now. I'm really happy!

We had the Geometry Test Re-Do, and I was a bit disappointed with this one because we've been explicitly practicing this stuff all week, and not to mention all the work we did on it before, but the results were pretty much the same. While we unfortunately can't spend any more class time on these concepts, students can still request another re-do if they like. I'll be pulling kids during the work period for small-group geometry lessons, but as a class, we will be moving on to division next week!

In the afternoon, we did Daily LA, Social Emotional Learning with Mr. Ripka, and Music - easy afternoon for me!

Tomorrow is our spelling quiz!

Have a nice day,

Zac

Wednesday, March 5

 Hi parents,

We had a great day today! In the morning,  the students made some tweaks to their dinosaur paragraphs. We learned some tricks for adding variety to sentence beginnings. Some students have started to write their good copies.

In math, we reviewed the three types of triangles. If you are in grade 4, this is going to be on your test tomorrow! For Grade 3's, it's still helpful to be able to identify equilateral triangles as 'regular polygons', while the other two types are not.

In the afternoon we did Daily LA, and then the students got to use our school's K-Nex Sets to create crank fans that use gear systems. The students got to experiment with different sizes of gears to see how these changes would affect the speed of the fan.

Remember that tomorrow is our Geometry Quiz! It will be basically the same as the last one, but with different polygons in each example. Students will need to know all the same stuff. Also - may be helpful to review 'rays', 'lines', and 'line segments', because we didn't get to those in class this week (we learned them a few weeks ago so its nothing new).

Have a nice night,

Zac

Tuesday, March 4

 Hi parents,

We had another pretty good day today. In the morning I gave a (fairly bad) lesson on writing 'conclusions' in paragraphs. It was a bad lesson because it's actually really hard to write a decent concluding sentence to wrap up a grade 3 / 4 level piece of writing - the purpose of a conclusion is to summarize, but it virtually always feels redundant to summarize a paragraph that was only 4 sentences long... anyway, we focused on the idea of at the very least, ending on a high note, with an engaging, interesting sentence that gives a feeling of closure. 

The students were somehow able to read between the lines of my confusing lesson and wrap their paragraphs up skillfully. I was quite proud. Now we just need to do a little editing, and then we'll be ready for good copies. 

From jot notes to paragraphs!

In math, we reviewed regular polygons, and learned about some of the more niche examples of them. For example, heptagons, nonagons, decagons.... While I don't expect students to have all these memorized, or to accurately draw them, I hope that seeing so many examples of regular polygons will help them easily recognize irregular polygons. 

In Science, we started learning about Simple Machines. This is a unit we did for quite a while last year, so we'll spend less time on it this time around, but its always a favourite. The plan is for students to design and build 'leprechaun traps' using simple machines. 

We ended our day with Music.

Have a nice night,

Zac

Monday, March 3

 Hi parents,

We had a pretty good day today. In the morning, the students continued writing their dinosaur paragraphs. They added 'body' sentences, sometimes literally, to tell readers more about their chosen dinosaur. We talked about the importance of grouping similar pieces of information when writing a paragraph and making sure everything flows, with different sentence beginnings. 

In math, the students finally got their geometry quizzes back, and we went over them as a class. We're going to have a re-do on Thursday, because I think the students could use a little extra review on Regular vs. Irregular polygons, and triangles for Grade 4s.

In the afternoon, we did Daily LA, Architecture Sketching, and Spelling Practice. We went over this week's words and the 'ow' sound in general.

Have a nice night,

Zac