Arrays of Love

By Tanis Masson On Friday, May 3, two of our alumni, Stephanos and Arianna Mavrikos (both Class of 2007), visited the Junior School to share a fundraising project their family has organized called CANstruction. This wonderful initiative through the Dahlia society is trying to help get food to those who need it at a time of year when most food bank shelves are pretty bare. For the project, the public donates canned food to the cause, which are then used as the building blocks of amazing sculptures. At GNS we were challenged to donate cans, and our students and staff did just that! The Grade 3s have just finished investigating multiplication, and this initiative offered a powerful visual representation of arrays. As they collected cans, the 3s stacked them into 2D and 3D arrays, creating our own unique CANstruction. Other classes had the chance to visit the displays, and students estimated the total number of cans. The Grade 3, 4 and 5 students also used their mental math skills to calculate the exact number of cans, which was 901!