We've continued our hard work on poetry this week! We focused on writing Thank You Poems and List Poems this week, and the students' creativity was delightful. You can see some of our poems below! This month, we'll been focusing on the essential skill of self-monitoring while reading. But what exactly is self-monitoring? It's the ability to recognize when we're understanding what we're reading and when we're not, and then to take steps to improve our comprehension. In our mini-lessons, we've been discussing strategies such as pausing to check for understanding, asking questions when something doesn't make sense, and rereading to clarify. By practicing self-monitoring, our students are not only becoming more fluent readers but also deepening their comprehension of texts.
There is an official winner for March Book Madness! After a month of reading, discussing books, and voting, the brackets were narrowed down to one final champion. You can watch the video below to find out which book was named the 2024 champion! It's national poetry month and we're learning all about writing poetry in 3SB! We've read lots of wonderful and varied poetry, and in our poetry writing we've been learning about how poets write about things that they observe and care about, that poets should pay close attention to the world around them and the feelings inside, and that poets revise their poems as they write. The students have enjoyed reading their poems to each other, and there have been lots of emotive and humorous poetry! Coming up in our writing, we'll learn more about language, form, revision, and building poetry anthologies. You can read some of the poems we've been inspired by here and read some of our poems below!
We're down to the elite eight books in March Book Madness! Students are voting between The Day the Crayons Quit, Gaston, Rescue & Jessica, My Pet Feet, The Tree and the River, Hidden Gem, Beneath, and Big. There are lots of opinions in our class on the pros and cons of each book, and we're eager to learn which books make it into the final four! We were so lucky to have Kookum Violet (Elder Violet Poitras from Paul First Nation) and our wonderful Indigenous Education Facilitator Ms. Leanne spend time with our class on Thursday! We read a special story together about a First Nations family, the often sacred significance of braids and hair in Indigenous culture, and the importance of kindness in Indigenous worldviews. Kookum Violet shared with us about the value of appreciating our loved ones and telling them we love them, how we need to take care of Mother Earth, about her childhood growing up in a First Nations family, and the challenges of going to school without her family when she was eight-years-old. We learned some important words in Cree and Stoney which the class really enjoyed. The students were absolutely thrilled to spend time with Kookum Violet, and found it very meaningful to learn from her perspective and wisdom. It was such a special visit!
Voting for March Book Madness officially starts next week! Mrs. Pirie has been reading some of the books to us in the library, and we've been enjoying reading the competing books in class as well. We've had some engaging conversations sharing our different opinions about our favourite books, and it's wonderful to hear the students summarizing their top picks, discussing the different purposes and audiences of the books, and evaluatiing the authors' choices. The students can't wait to start voting on March 6, and we're extremely curious to find out which books make it to round 2!
Taking inspiration from basketball’s iconic March Madness, Millgrove students are participating in their own book-related tournament! Instead of shooting hoops, our students are flexing their reading muscles this month. March Book Madness is a worldwide literacy initiative that pits 16 picture books against each other, similar in format to the NCAA March Madness basketball tournament. During each bracket, two books go up against each other and are then voted on—majority-rule style. Votes are then tallied, and whichever book gets the most votes moves on to the next round. In February students at Millgrove began reading the book contenders with Mrs. Pirie. Voting opens on March 6, and we can’t wait to find out which books make it to the second round!
For the month of February our class is learning all about how to make inferences when reading both fiction and nonfiction texts! We’ve been searching for clues in our books, and taking time to observe, wonder, and infer. When we infer, we want to make an educated guess or conclusion using evidence from the text. Through inferring, students learn to read between the lines, make predictions, and draw logical conclusions, enhancing their comprehension and critical thinking abilities. This skill empowers young readers to engage more deeply with texts, interpret characters' emotions and motivations, and understand the underlying themes and messages of the story. We’ve been inferring a great deal with our read aloud Because of Winn-Dixie, and Kate DiCamillo definitely leaves a lot of space for inferring in her book!
Thanks to the collaboration of Mrs. Schmaus and Mrs. Mills, we've continued enjoying our weekly buddy times with Mrs. Mills' grade one class! The class has had lots of fun learning with them, and they always look forward to reading with our buddies. It's such a special way to enjoy reading and build a sense of belonging in our school!
Our reading mini-lessons this month are all about the strategy of questioning! Good readers ask questions as they read, and sometimes they're not even aware that they do this while they read a text. One thing we're emphasizing in class is that we want to aim for more "deep-thinking questions" rather than "quick questions" because deep-thinking questions enhance the meaning of a book. Students need to ask relevant and meaningful questions, often starting with words like why, I wonder, what if, why do you think, or how do you think. We always have interesting questions in our class, and it's been a joy to hear all of the deep-thinking questions students have with our books this month!
This week we explored a mini-unit on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. We read the book, watched part of the Citadel's David van Belle Citadel play production (which was also available virtually), and watched the Muppets' film version. The students enjoyed comparing the different adaptations of the story, and examining the history of why Charles Dickens wrote the story and how its message is still important today. To cap off our unit, we played Jeopardy to review our knowledge of the story and the students earned an impressive amount (not that the money matters so much, as we learned from Ebenezer Scrooge of course). It was lovely to see the class embrace the Christmas spirit and remember the importance of kindness and generosity this week! As we continue to practice our persuasive writing skills in our current writing unit, we delved in the genre of advertisements. The students researched the history of ugly Christmas sweaters and then set to work designing their own ugly Christmas sweaters and detailing numerous convincing reasons that their audience should purchase that sweater. The advertisements were truly convincing, and there are some cunning businesspeople in the making in our class The students of 3SB have put a tremendous amount of work into their multiple biographies this past month, and this week we capped off that work by publishing them! Mrs. Pirie is going to have them as published books in the library, and our schoolmates will be able to sign them out and learn from all the hard research that these writing pieces represent! There's a wonderful diversity of who the students wrote about, and their use of varied non-fiction text features, clear organization, and in-depth knowledge are very commendable!
In late November, the students all wrote letters to Santa, and today we got our letter back from him! He sent us a lovely note, including notification that all the students made it onto the nice list! He wrote a specific note to each student from the letters they each wrote to him which was especially thoughtful and special. It was the best mail we could receive a week before before Winter Break!
With the new month came a new writing unit, and we’re now working on changing the world around us with our writing! We’ll be writing persuasive speeches, petitions, and editorials in the coming weeks during our writing time, and the class has been hard at work convincing their audiences of their theses. We are working on changing things in our school and community, and the students have been looking for noteworthy topics and fixable problems to write about. We’ve learned about on developing brave, bold opinions and considering our audience when crafting our arguments. With our recent work on global citizenship in Social Studies, it’s the perfect time for us to be using our writing to change the world around us, whether our school, friends, or community! This month in our reading mini-lessons, we'll be practicing the skill of visualizing as we read! Visualizing is all about making a picture in our minds of what we're reading about. When readers visualize:
We wrote letters to Santa yesterday, and then delivered them using Canada Post's Santa Letter-Writing program today. It's always engaging to write to a meaningful audience, and there are few audiences as exciting as Santa Claus himself! We're hoping that he might write back to us before Christmas time, so we'll keep watching out for some class mail with anticipation!
This week our class, and many other classes at Millgrove, wrote postcards to members of the Canadian Armed Forces to express our gratitude for their important work. The students had many thoughtful and reflective messages to share, and it was meaningful to think of the many ways our armed forces help our citizens and other places around the world. Especially these days, we're grateful for the women and men in those roles who help keep our country, and others, safe.
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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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