We commemorated Orange Shirt Day today (and earlier this week as well) to remember and recognize children who were affected by residential schools in Canada's past. The students showed great compassion and respect, and we had excellent conversations about how we can ensure that children are never treated like that again in our country. We spent the week reading Indigenous stories, listening to Elders, hearing the perspectives of Indigenous students in our class, and working on a special activity with our grade one buddies to honour Indigenous people impacted by the tragedy of residential schools. You can watch the videos below to learn more about Orange Shirt Day. |
This month in our reading we're working on making connections to the text we are reading. These texts can be to our own lives, to another book/movie/song, or to some background knowledge we have. Connecting when reading is an important comprehension strategy that allows readers to make personal connections to the text. It can involves relating the content of the text to the reader's own experiences, thoughts, and emotions which helps to deepen the reader's understanding of the text and make it more meaningful. Connecting when reading also allows readers to engage with the text on a more personal level, making it a more enjoyable experience. The students have been using sticky notes to mark where they made their strongest connection in our class read-aloud, and they've loved sharing what that connection was with the rest of the class!
We've been learning a lot this month about how to craft personal narrative stories during our writing lessons, and this week we learned from authors like Karen Hesse in Come On Rain about how to make our writing powerful and meaningful. The students have written on a variety of topics in class including their families, favourite season, and favourite toy. We learned that Robert Munsch never publishes a story until he's told it at least 100 times, and while we won't write 100 drafts of our writing pieces, we're learning that it takes a lot of refining and writing to get a book published!
We ran our annual Terry Fox run today and Millgrove had already achieved our fundraising goal of $1000! The students were very inspired by the story of Terry and how he put others first. They ran hard in the run, and showed great concern for the people they were running for. It was a special Terry Fox assembly because some students from 3SB had the important job of helping to host and speak during the gathering, and they all did an incredible job. We sure felt inspired today by Canadian hero Terry Fox!
As we continue learning about our Earth Systems unit in science, we paid special attention to how wind, water, or ice can move materials, create river runoff, and create landforms such as Alberta's badlands and the Grand Canyon. The students particularly enjoyed making glaciers and observing how they make striations as they moved across our pretend "land" in class. Mrs. Schmaus taught us all about Georges Seurat and his most famous painting A Sunday on La Grande Jatte this month. He was well known for a technique called pointillism in which coloured dots are applied in patterns to form an image. The class collaborated to each recreate a piece of this art, and then combine it, exploring colour and pointillism. Their artwork sure turned out magnifique as Georges Seurat would say! Today was Millgrove’s infamous Tacky Tourist Day for grade three classes, and the students did not disappoint! To celebrate the year ahead of learning about countries around the world, students dressed up in their cheesiest traveling gear. We also read the book This is How We Do It to reflect on how families around the world are diverse but also share a lot in common. Our year of global learning is off to a great (and hilarious) start! We got to take part in a Google Meet with schools from across Canada this morning hosted by the Terry Fox Foundation. The hosts taught us all about Terry's life, noble dream, and legacy. Our favourite part was probably when we got to unmute our microphones and do extra loud cheers for Terry with kids from across the country!
In science this week we took a closer look at natural events that can change the Earth's surface in a short period of time including volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, landslides, tsunamis, and floods. We found out that many of these events are very unlikely to happen near Spruce Grove, but also learned about how communities use research and science to help predict these events and keep them safe if they occur. Our class took a close look at rocks that are formed in some of these events, and they especially enjoyed designing structures that were stable enough to withstand our makeshift earthquake. It's so interesting to see that the Earth can change over millions of years with events like mountain building, or over the course of one short day with events like a volcanic eruption. You can take a look below to check out some of our learning on these events! Today we celebrated Dot Day in 3SB! Dot Day is based on the book "The Dot" by Peter Reynolds about a girl named Vashti who initially believes she can't draw, but later discovers that everyone can make a mark in the world. 15 million people in 181 countries are celebrating Dot Day this year, and we marked the occasion in 3SB by dressing up in dots, working on a dot art project, and reflecting on how we can all make a mark in the world after reading the book. You can see the book "The Dot" below. This month in math we've been working on our problem solving skills with some group routines in class. Based on some research from Peter Liljedahl’s Thinking Classroom framework, we've been trying out some big math problems, different arrangements of groups, and vertical writing surfaces to record our mathematical thinking. The students have grown to really enjoy our problem solving time, and there's definitely been a lot of thinking going on during our math time! You can learn more about Building Thinking Classrooms with the video below. We've been working hard in 3SB this week on our reading and writing! Grade three is a big year of growth for students as readers and writers, and we've been practicing building our stamina in both of those areas.
In Reading Workshop, we've been talking about how grade three readers build a powerful reading life, read as if books are gold, and read tons of within-reach books. Students have been working on thinking deeply about our books, and we've started talking about some meta-cognitive strategies such as making connections to help us develop our reading comprehension abilities. Our Writing Workshop this year is starting with a focus on personal narrative writing. Our class has been hard at work examining examples of excellent grade three writing, learning about strategies to help us find writing ideas, and writing up a storm. It's a big job getting back into the swing of writing after the summer, but students are starting to get into more of a groove getting their ideas onto paper and having stamina during writing time. The class loved getting to hear their peers' writing during our sharing time! Grade three has one of the most exciting curricula of all the grades because we get to learn about places all around the world! Our Social Studies units in grade three are built around the theme of “Connecting with the World.” We will focus on communities in four countries:
In our first unit, we've been locating the communities on maps and globes and working on reading maps and making maps. We’ll be studying life in the selected cities, towns, and villages in each of the countries. We will learn about:
This unit will help develop an understanding and appreciation for people in other parts of the world. We're looking forward to "traveling the globe" this year in grade three! We’ve been digging deep into our science learning about our planet Earth and how the Earth's surface changes ver time! We’ve worked on classifying and sorting minerals, tapping into our geological background knowledge, and we were be tasked with the very important mission of helping geologist Jess Geo. Jess is asking us to help sort some minerals that got jumbled up in transit, and we were able to help her out in identifying 12 minerals today! In our unit on Earth's this term, we’ll be learning lots of important concepts about the Earth's surface, including:
Students are welcome to bring interesting fossils or minerals from home to share with the class during our science class. They've already been sharing a wealth of background information about dinosaurs and volcanoes, and we can't wait to learn more! Our class is beginning a math unit on Numbers to 100 000, and the students are always thinking of interesting ways to count, represent numbers, and compare amounts! In this unit, the students will:
Here are some activities you can do at home to support this learning:
What a great first week! It was a pleasure to meet all the lovely new students of 3SB, and to get to know them! I can tell it's going to be a great year with this group of children (in my very favourite grade, grade three)! We got to go to settle into our room and spend some time outdoors, and the students were very gracious in getting to know each other and our new classroom. I can't wait to see what the rest of our school year has in store!
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Mrs. BarkerMrs. Barker is a grade three teacher at Millgrove School. She loves science and reading, and lives in a little brick house with Mr. Barker and her kids Jack and Ellie. Archive
April 2024
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