Connaught School's Grade 3/4 Classroom Blog

Hi families, Grade 3/4 students are continuing to build their understanding of place value. This year, grade 3s are learning about numbers up to 1,000 and grade 4s are learning about numbers up to 10,000. When looking at large numbers, students are encouraged to think about the following questions: what value does this digit represent? How can I show this number? Can I show this number in many different ways? The grade 3/4 team has almost completed a full cycle of Power Hour modalities. This means that your student has almost completed all of the modalities and will have an opportunity to explore two modalities in more depth. They will combine 2 new modalities from Power Hour to complete a final project. Our class is continuing to read our novel, "Inkling" by Kenneth Oppel. In the novel, we learned what Inkling eats and how he eats! We also learned more about Ethan's mom, dad and sister. Can your student predict what will happen to Ethan's comic project?

The grade 3/4 students have been learning about place value. We have been using the base ten number system to understand each digits proper place and its value. We have been learning how to represent our numbers in different ways such as standard form, expanded form, written and, using base ten blocks. This week grade 3/4 have been playing a variety of games to practice strategies we have learned to better help us understand numbers! We continued Power Hour, students please share which modality you learned this week and if you chose plant or animal life cycles to represent. We learned about Metis "the flower beadwork people." We studied a painting by Canadian artist named Christie Belcourt titled "My Heart is Beautiful." We used her beadwork art as inspiration to create our own! Began reading our class novel "The City of Ember" by Jeanne Duprau. Students began recording their knowledge and understanding of the stories setting, characters, thoughts an

November 12th POWER HOUR has begun! The Grade 3/4 Team, along with Ms. Bezugley and Ms. Corinne, are engaged in a 7 modality project with all Grade 3/4 students. The modalities were chosen to engage students in unique ways to show their learning. The focus is to build student capacity in the modalities based upon representing their understanding of one of two units in Science we have all covered:  Plant Growth and Change and Animal Life Cycles. Teachers developed an individual rubric for their specific modality specifying what would constitute a 1, 2, 3 and 4 for that specific modality.  As a teaching team, we also created a rubric for the content portion of the project. Students are aware of these rubrics and how they would be assessed in each center. They are given as much flexibility in choosing whether they show their understanding of Animal Life Cycles or Plant Growth and Change.  For example, one grade 4 student chose a pumpkin as her plant for Visual Journaling and a cat t