Hello, all, and welcome to the official blog for Room 16, grade 3/4. My name is Mr. McClure and I am very excited for the upcoming year. I hope your children have already told you about some of the things we've been doing, and will be doing. It's going to be a busy year. Below is a picture of our classroom (before school started!). We'll be working both individually, in small groups, and as a class.

We've already started building our learning community, having spent the first two weeks setting expectations, standards for work and behaviour, and having fun. One of our first activities was to highlight how groups can often produce more complex and interesting results than when we work alone. The students were each given a small piece of clay and asked to model something. They then combined their clay with a friend and produced something new (and larger and more complex). Then, finally, they worked in groups of 4 or 5 to produce something interesting. This required teamwork, collaboration, and listening to others. It went pretty well. Here's some pictures below:

Currently, we are working on the following: In Math, we are working on patterns and relations, as well as number sense. Number sense is especially important, and includes notions such as grasping the concept of less than vs more; understanding quantities; and understanding sequences of numbers, such as being able to say quickly what comes after a certain number (what is one more than eighteen, for example). In Science, we are working on Plant and Animal Life Cycles. We are currently studying insects. We are also, however, about to begin a new project. We are going to build an eco-column, which is an enclosed ecosystem constructed inside three 2L pop bottles. So, if you have any 2L bottles, send them in! Here is a grainy example of one I made as an exemplar.

In this project, we'll be practicing our design-thinking skills, math, language arts, science and more. It should be a blast. We'll document our progress on this blog. In Language Arts, we are using Adrienne Gear's Reading Powers as we work on building our comprehension skills in reading and writing. I'm working on a special, top-secret project with the grade threes, which we hope to reveal before winter break.