This term we have been using the time before school really starts 8.30 am and a little after the bell 8.55 am to sharpen our maths fluency skills. We have been working on our recall skills for number facts. We were taught a great game called flip.
Using a pack of cards we flip over a card and we need to say the number to finish the fact. Learning facts to ten. All number cards are face value e.g. 7 of hearts is worth seven. Picture cards Jack, Queen and King are worth ten. Aces are worth one.
Using a timer we set one minute to go through the pack. When the minute is up, we count our successful cards. We have found that over the weeks our totals are increasing. We are recalling facts a lot quicker. The helps us when we need to calculate in problem solving.
The great thing about flip is we can play it individually or in partners. When we feel really confident, Ellen does a game with us to test our skills.
Once we are confident at one fact family, we challenge ourselves for different amounts such as to 20, or to 8. It’s great fun. Beepers are going off everywhere, there is a hive of mathematical activity.
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As we move into learning our multiplication facts we can still play flip, instead of making totals to a number, we can multiply the card shown by a certain table number e.g. pull a seven, times by two is 14. So we can learn our two times table facts a lot quicker.
There’s a lot to be said about practice makes perfect.
This term we have been fortunate to have Chess expert Alan Goldsmith from Knights & Bytes teaching us all about the game of Chess. He has been teaching Grange kids and staff the skills of how to think logically and strategically in order to capture the opponent’s King for many years.
Alan taught us about each piece and how to move each piece. We also needed to know how much they were worth if we captured one.
While we knew the information, winning a game is about careful thinking, planning and strategy! We found out it is important to think about the opponents next possible moves. We gave it a go.
Alan taught us to read the board as if it was a map and we could move pieces according to their position. for example Q to F4.
Did you know you need to do CPR in chess? That means if you hear that your King is in Check there are three things you should do.
C – Capture Can you capture any piece? If you can, then do that and the King is safe, if not then…
P – Protect Move a piece in to protect the King, if you can, then the King is safe, if not then…
R – Run The King needs to flee to safety!
Chess is all about protecting the King.
But if you want to do some extra chess playing go to www.chesstempo.com that is a site that will teach you exciting strategies.
If you really want to get into more chess then checkout www.knightsandbytes.com.au Alan has a host of chess information and activities available for you to peruse.
Next term we are having a chess tournament to find the top players in year three. Will it be you? Start practicing.
What have you learnt about Chess?
What would you still like to know?
Do you think playing chess is a useful activity? Why, Why not?
Reading numbers like this 830 150 753 is a challenge, so where do we start?
Well knowingplace value helps. That is looking at the value of a digit and knowing what it is worth by the position in the number.
We have been having a lot of fun learning how to better understand place value. We have learnt the first four places – Thousand Hundred Ten One then we played a game using playing cards. In pairs each player would flip a card and place it in one of those positions. The aim was to make the highest number. The winner was the one who could win five times.
I love it when they explain their mathematical strategies while they are playing, it helps us with our thinking. I reckon sharing how you do work is very helpful to others and ourselves.
This was a great warm up place value activity, then it came to writing these big numbers. First thing we did was to make our own set of arrow cards. These were colour coded for each place value. It took a while to cut everything, but it was worth it.
Go team one
Love the concentration team five
Way to go team three great modelling for others
Once that job was done we could make lots of four digit numbers. So randomly choosing one of each colour, we made 4 digit numbers.
But that’s not all.. No, we learnt that there were three ways you could record a number. Check this out..
Anita has built the number 7762 with the cards she randomly chose, she can write it 3 ways
StandardForm 7762
Expanded Form 7000 + 700 + 60 + 2
Written Form seven thousand seven hundred and sixty two
Look at them go..
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Using the arrow cards made a lot of sense to us. We could clearly see where the numerals needed to go to make the standard form and when it came to expanding the number, it was easy to read. Once we could read it, it was easy to write what we said… but we had to check our spelling for accuracy.
We’re not experts yet, but we have a made a great start to becoming one.
Something to think about.
What did you think of the place value card game?
What could you do to try to win the game?
Is it better to go first or second?
How do you feel about place value after using the arrow cards?
Greetings to all our new families for this, the beginning of the school year. Welcome to our blog too, we hope you find it useful to keep in touch with what is happening in our class and to provide people with supportive and thoughtful feedback.
There’ll be lots of routines and procedures to learn. It’s early days we’ll get there.
How exciting to be starting in the primary, year three is going to be so much fun indeed. I will catch up with parents and caregivers at acquaintance night next week to clarify a lot of things. Hope to see you there.
Collaboration
Our class has a mantra
“We work together, we think together, we act together. We collaborate”
This term we will be practicing collaboration and what this may look like, sound like, feel like and think like.
Today we stared by working in pairs on a maths task.
The task was – To collect 3 digit numbers, sort them and publish our thinking.
Now while we were using our mathematical logic smarts, we were also practicing our skills in working together. Check us out.
For our first go, I reckon we have a positive start and I particularly liked the way they all respectfully shared their information.
I was also impressed by the variety of ways to sort information. Take a look at their posters.
Some things to think about, let us know your comments.
In term three and four our science topic had to do with What creates day and night, so it made sense to also investigate other cosmic ideas. We had enormous fun investigating these science ideas. We had a go at recording what we thought happened in space, before learning new information.
To begin with, we had to get our heads around the different ways things move in space. You would think that we would know if we were spinning and moving on Earth, as we live here, but oh no! Our eyes can play tricks on us and our brains often get tricked too. This great Crash Course Kids clip on how the Earth moves, did help us clarify a few misconceptions.
Trying to understand the differences between and remember, rotation, revolution, orbit did make our heads spin.
So next it was our turn to investigate these celestial bodies for ourselves and really see things in action.
Space is REALLY, REALLY BIG and Things in space are really big and it’s hard to get our heads to understand that. We used these relative sizes pictures to understand that size is indeed relative. That means compared to each other. Ellen is bigger than us, we are small, but compared to a baby we are giants! The Moon is big, but Earth is bigger and when we looked at the Sun, it was the biggest… or was it? Check these out.
The terrestrial Planets
All planets including Gas Giants
The Solar System
Our Sun compared to Arcturus
Arcturus compared to Antares
Still, hard to get our brains to think of anything that BIG! But distance in space can affect the size of what we see too.
So getting back to the three objets we were studying Sun, Earth and Moon we checked out their sizes. We used a basketball for the Sun, tennis ball for the Moon in this activity. Using our eyes to measure and working in teams we took turns to see how far the Sun would have to be moved away, so that the Moon and the Sun appeared the same size to the observer.
Now I told them that even though we know the Sun is enormous, it is also far away and that it appeared the same size as a full Moon in the sky. Just as their basketball looked the same as the tennis ball from their activity… they weren’t convinced.
It was time to prove it to them. Luckily I had my eclipse glasses and making sure they operated within the safety rules, they each checked out just how small the Sun actually looked in the sky.. it really is no bigger than a full Moon. Cool! Amazing, they even saw the Sunspots.
So it is true, the Sun and the Moon appear to be the same size! Incidentally that’s why we get Solar eclipses. These are fascinating events indeed. If ever you can, be in the path of totality.
What do Shadows tell us?
Well a lot really and it turned out we already knew a lot about shadows.
Ah, so now it was time to investigate light and shadows. It was tricky to get our room dark enough, but we experimented with torches and making shadows. Some of us were exceptionally talented at shadow puppetry.
From our observations, we reconfirmed many of our scientific ideas about how light works and what created a shadow. Light does travel in a straight line and anything getting in the way of the ray of light blocked it, creating a shadow. This gave us lots of information to get us thinking of what we could investigate.
Getting back to the sun and the shadows we saw around the school, we decided to set out an investigation on how these shadows in the school changed over the day.
In our teams we planned to go out every hour on the hour and measure the length of a gnomon. ( shadow stick, much like a sundial) Each team found a sunny spot. Lined the gnomon/poster to the North with a compass and set about recording the time and length of the shadows cast by the gnomon throughout the day.
Eventually with shared team work, our boards looked a little like this.
Once we had all our recorded observations, we could look at the information closely and see if we noticed any thing interesting. This is called analysing data.
In our teams once a gain we set about analysing the information . We discussed our ideas and made our claims based on the data.
To make our observations clearer, we organised them into a table and from that, we could create a graph.
This graphic record made it easier for us read and come up with some claims and conclusions it was the proof and evidence we needed.
We claimed that:-
Shadows changed length over the day long to short then long again.
That when the Sun is low in the sky, the shadows are longer and when it is high in the sky, the shadow are shorter.
The Sun moved from East to West over the sky because the shadows moved West East.
Our Conclusions
We know that the Sun is in the Centre of the Solar System. It rotates but doesn’t move. So that meant the Sun didn’t move, it was Earth’s rotation that made it look like the Sun was moving.
So as the Sun continues to shine light and we know the Earth spins once every 24 hours. We get day when we face towards the Sun and we are in night when we are in the shadow of Earth.
But we also know that we are orbiting the Sun and as we go on our year long journey around the Sun, we take our Moon with us. That combination of rotations and orbits does get our heads dizzy thinking about it.
Understanding how all this works is tricky, but we enjoyed learning about our near celestial neighbours and working scientifically.
We also had the opportunity to give an oral presentation on a topic to do with space. We had a great variety of themes planets, rockets, space travel, famous astronauts etc. These were well researched and shared confidently for the most part.
Space Art
For a creative challenge, we could make an alien from plasticine and perhaps their pet, if they had one.
What do you think of our modelling skills?
Somethings to think about.
What did you think of this science unit?
What didn’t you like investigating?
What would you like to do more of?
What are you still puzzled about and would like to learn more about?
