Mr. Pressey

March 23rd Thank you to all of the parents and caregivers who attended our Parent-Teacher Night. Classes will resume on April the 8th. We had an excellent final week before the break. This past week we continued to explore the engineering process by building bridges. We used our blue prints to begin. All of our lessons about material testing and shapes aided us in our construction. Many of us have begun testing, trouble-shooting and modifying our designs. We also worked hard to finish up some of the things that we have been doing before the break. We finished up our reports about Canada using the jot notes that we took over the past month. It was important for us to remember to include an introductory paragraph, body paragraphs with introductory sentences and an ending paragraph. Now we are all ready to start researching some other countries from around the world when we get back. Ms Nguyen finished reading I Survived, which we really enjoyed. Here is some additional math pract

March 15 Remember parents please book your parent teacher conference. You can do this by going to https://sis.cbe.ab.ca/public/home.html This week we continued to develop our engineering skills. We were designing our blue prints for our final bridge building activity. We were thinking about how shapes and materials will make our structures stronger. It was also important to think about how we could design using tension and compression. We have been exploring subtraction with regrouping again since it has been a long time and we were having some trouble remembering how to do it. We set a goal of getting 16 out of 32 subtraction regrouping questions correct and we achieved our goal :) Grade 3 Home Practice Grade 4 Home Practice

This week we started a new unit in gym all about skipping. Some of us learned how to do criss-crossing. Also some of us are beginning to try double jumping, which even Mr. Presssey can't do, yet. We like when we skip to music because it makes it more fun. Early this week we had a guest come in. It was Mr. Guenther's brother and he came in to teach us about the engineering process for Science. He taught us that the weakest part of the bridge is the middle and that you can make your bridge strong by using triangles to make trusses. This reminds us of when we did an experiment to find out that corrugated materials are strong. We have been practicing taking sketchnotes about different things. This is when we take notes but we really try to include pictures because our brains remember them better than notes. We took notes about what engineers are and what makes bridges strong. Finally we strated writing our report all about Canada. We used all of our mindmap notes that we have

This week we started working like engineers. We were exploring how shapes and materials made structures stronger. We did an experiment where we tested the strength of materials that we will use to build our bridges. We discovered that even though string and pipe cleaners were flexible they were also really strong. Later in the week we did an experiment that taught us that corrugated materials and arches were much stronger than flat bridges. Finally on Thursday we did an experiment that involved different columns. We found out that cylindrical columns were stronger than triangular or rectangular prisms because the weight is spread out evenly. We started reading a new novel in the mornings. We are now reading I Survived the 1906 San Francisco Earthquake. The story is about a boy who was growing up during the California Gold Rush. Lots of the kids in the class signed out other I Survived books from the library this week. On Monday we have an expert coming into talk to us about the eng