Compass Work

Today we started learning about compasses and direction by making a water compass. This is a great project and gets the children excited about compasses right from the get go. Most of our compass boats pointed North but a couple (as always) pointed South. We can never figure out why this happens. It must have something to do with the way the children magnetize their needle but whatever the reason it always makes a good discussion point :)

               
                                                     Here's one of our finished boats!

We followed up our experiment by going outside with compasses and navigating our way around the field. Later this week we'll have a treasure hunt and see how much the children remember. They'll have to use their compass to find the treasure somewhere in the school. :)

Gingerbread Day

We celebrate Gingerbread Day every year. It's always a secret and I'm not telling what day it will be yet but here are some of our favourite activities posted on TpT.

Go to Gingerbread Day on TpT

Romans and Celts

We finished our giant Roman soldier and Celtic warrior this week. The children painted them and made labels and then stapled them (using a thousand staples at least) to the bulletin board. I think they look great!











New project: We've started making our shields and swords - we are Legio XI - in preparation for our mock battle and demonstration of Roman army formations next week. We're waiting on the other two legions (aka my co-teachers and their classes) to be fully armed and ready for warfare!!  I'm getting my victory laurel wreath ready! :)

Sale starting on Monday November 26th at TpT. Check out all your favorite sellers :)

Polygon Scarecrows

We made these cute Polygon Scarecrows last week as a combined "measuring in cm" and "reviewing polygons" Math activity.

Once the scarecrows were assembled the children could decorate them any way they wanted using only polygons. (The only exception was the face - they were allowed to draw curves there :) )
I copied the templates and have posted it as a freebie on TpT.

You can find it here. Polygon Scarecrows freebie

Turkey Time

Even though Thanksgiving is not a public holiday in our area of the world we still like to talk about it and have fun with turkeys and other harvest themes. Since we're learning about Measurement right now - and Time is one aspect of that - I decided to have a Turkey Time day.
We reviewed o'clock, quarter to, half past and quarter to and then made some cute turkey clocks to create a Turkey Time Trail on the corridor bulletin board. Next week the Year 3s (Grade 2 children) will visit our Time Trail to see how many turkey times they can get right. My girls are looking forward to marking the younger students' work :)

                                                    Here are some of our cute turkeys!

Hello from Year 4

Blogging is a whole new experience for me but having seen some blogs of fellow teachers around the world - and having viewed their classrooms virtually - I thought it would be fun to post some of my own Year 4 (Grade 3) class projects.
Our school is an all-girls school and I have 16 students this year - a great number for group work and center work :)
We follow the British National Curriculum in Math and Language and incorporate History, Geography and Science into Units of Inquiry - called Topic or Project work. Math and Language often end up in Project work as well - it's a fun way to learn :)

This term we've been doing a unit on Invaders and Settlers and have been studying the Ancient Romans and the Iron Age Celts in Britain. It's a great project and we've been able to use Math and Language skills in lots of interesting ways.






One of my favourite projects was building a Roman Garrison town using symmetry, measurement and nets for 3-D shapes. The girls had a blast creating the buildings, putting up the walls, creating their legion of soldiers and making their own Roman standard for their miniature town.

In our classroom all bulletin board displays are kid-created. We built Rome (and truly, it wasn't built in a day!!)















and a Celtic settlement
(the Roman invasion begins next week!)






And that's my first blog post - I guess I'll figure out all the finer details of posting as time goes on and will look forward to sharing more Fun in the Fours :)