Saturday 30 August 2014

Inquiring ahead

The month of August seems to be full of short weeks. In these short spans of time we have been busy learning about some of the major land forms in the world. To portray our understanding of land forms we got into groups and used our bodies to show different land forms. It was a fun task that made us think.



To understand how the land forms are distributed in the world, we began by tracing the map and identifying the various oceans and continents. We researched to find out which are the major land forms in the world and began by marking out the mountain ranges and the rivers in the different continents.
Take a sneak peek here ......


While working on this we get very curious to know about the land forms that we have in our country. So we made a salt map of Maharashtra and shaped up the different land forms we have in our state. Stay tuned to look at the completed map. Maharashtra Salt Map coming soon.....

A short glimpse till you wait ....





A big thank you to Ms. Nirmala and Ms. Siya for sharing about Ganesha in the assembly. It was very interesting.



This week in Math, we have been focusing on comparing numbers and understanding greater than less than and equal to.


Friday 22 August 2014

Our first unit of Inquiry - Where we are in place and time

We began our new unit this week. We tuned in by coloring the outline map with the colors we think the Earth looks like. We brainstormed what these colors reminds us of.



               We used the Y chart to think about how the Earth looks like .....sounds like..... feels like.



       As part of our prior assessment we shared and discussed with our friends what the puzzles looked like          and what they reminded us of .


               
  A glimpse into what our friends and we thought while looking at the pictures.....


               
                        It was a challenging for us to unfold the central idea but...... we finally figured it out.



This week we also spent some time understanding the PYP concepts. Thank you Ms. Cecilia and Grade 5 for the lovely session.We used the understanding to think of questions that would help us learn more about our unit of inquiry based on the concepts we are going to cover through this unit.




In Math, we have begun working with place value. Place value is important because it helps us understand the meaning of a number. If everyone used numbers randomly no one would know which numbers people meant. We need place value to understand the order as numbers as well.




In Language, we read the story  'The Gruffalos child' and wrote our first reading responses on it. We also reviewed describing and rhyming words through the story. We hunted for all the describing words and rhyming pairs we could find in the book. We are also increasing our word bank by learning to use different words for common words like good, nice, walk......Stay tuned as we fill our word banks!!!!!




We had our first PYP assembly of the year. The third graders had everyone swinging and turning and stamping and SMILING with their song Hey Hey everybody by Mar.



Saturday 16 August 2014

A new start with the Awesome Twosome!!!

Every end is a new beginning.... 

Meet the third graders of the academic year 2014-15. We welcome the awesome twosome....
Aditya Parikh and Laay Patel.



During the last few days we have been busy getting to know each other....setting our class routines.....making up our class essential agreements. We recounted about the exciting times from our summer break.




We worked on our first Math project......Different ways to make a number. We sat and thought of how can we make one number with different combinations. We are trying to work on sharpening our mental math skills.We are still working on it.




We had fun with estimation and numbers. We began with 10 straws and then we tried to estimate how far would 100 straws take us........followed by predicting how far 1000 straws take us. It was a lot of  fun.




             
                 We will be beginning our first  Unit of Inquiry next week. Stay tuned........