Animal Adaptations

Today we talked about animal adaptations. We watched a short video and then answered some comprehension questions, before starting our research on the layers of the rainforest. Students will choose an animal and a plant, do some research and then we will put it all together into a collaborative art piece. Stay tuned!

Array Capture

Today we played "Array Capture," to practice drawing arrays and our basic facts.

Multiplication Strategies

How can you use multiplication to solve these problems more efficiently?

Brain Power

Today we reviewed how our brain can serve as a map for showing us how we learn and why we behave the way we do. Ask your child to explain each part of the brain shown in the diagram below.

Rainforests

The next country we will be learning about in Social Studies is Peru. To get us thinking about the land and resources in this beautiful country, we read this great book together. It generated many great discussions about the importance of protecting the world's rain forests. Ask your child about the story of the "Great Kapok Tree."

Multiplication

This week started our unit on multiplication. This is new concept for grade 3 students and a great opportunity for review for grade 4 students.

Grade 3 students will:

Demonstrate an understanding of multiplication to 5 × 5 by:
• representing and explaining multiplication using equal grouping and arrays
• creating and solving problems in context that involve multiplication
• modelling multiplication using concrete and visual representations, and recording the process symbolically
• relating multiplication to repeated addition
• relating multiplication to division
• Understand and recall multiplication facts to 5 × 5

Grade 4 students will:

Describe and apply mental mathematics strategies to determine basic multiplication facts to 9 × 9 and related division facts.
• Recall facts to 7 × 7

Demonstrate an understanding of multiplication (2- or 3-digit by 1-digit) to solve problems by:
• using personal strategies for multiplication with and without concrete materials
• using arrays to represent multiplication
• connecting concrete representations to symbolic representations
• estimating products
• applying the distributive property

Happy New Year

We started off the day by thinking of a "word goal" that we will work on for the next few months. This is a word that will help us to focus on an area, in which we want to improve and grow.