 This week in PE we've been playing some cooperative games and trying out centres in the gym (not rotating centres this year because of sanitization protocols). The students especially enjoyed group juggling and scooters this week. Of course, they highly enjoyed playing hide and seek in the woods as usual on our weekly Participark walk!
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This week we started our new Science unit on Testing Materials and Designs! Miss Gartner is getting the students all set up as contractors, and we’re feeling very ready to tackle this new mission in 3B since we got a business license and our own individual contractor pencils! In this unit, students will study the materials and designs used in construction tasks. They will compare paper, clay, cardboard, styrofoam, and other available materials to see which are the strongest—which ones resist bending, crushing, or tearing—and which are the most easily shaped and joined. They will test different shapes and thicknesses to find out what makes a structure strong and stable and to find out how much material is needed. Students will learn that many factors are considered the materials and designs are selected and that different tasks may require different materials and designs. In the coming weeks, students will learn to:
In grade three, we learn about measuring height in centimetres (and metres) and we also learn about the life cycles of plants (and animals). To get started on these learning outcomes, this week we got some plants in our classroom. We will be tracking the growth of these plants over time and observing changes as their life cycles progress. The students especially enjoyed naming their plants, and we are curious to see how the plants grow in the weeks ahead!   To remember the important sacrifices of our soldiers this Remembrance Day, our class made magnified red poppies that would have come from Flanders Fields. We made these flowers in the style of Georgia O’Keeffe, who we learned about last week in Art. Georgia O’Keeffe is famous for her magnified, detailed approach to portraying flowers. You can watch the videos below to learn more about Georgia O'Keeffe and her flower art, and to see Millgrove's virtual Remembrance Day Ceremony for this year.  As part of our learning on Global Citizenship this month, our class created a Diversity Quilt to celebrate the many unique cultures, traditions, languages, and heritages represented in our class. The quilt squares included images as diverse as Ghanaian traditions, family Christmas rituals, and students’ French linguistic backgrounds. You can see the quilt above, and watch the video below for Mom Fox’s book Whoever You Are about the many things that are unique, and also many that are unifying to each global citizen.
In reading for the next couple of months we’ll be shifting our focus to reading non-fiction texts! Our unit will be all about reading to learn, grasping main ideas, and accessing text structures. So far we’ve worked on previewing our books, identifying the main idea, extracting key points, and becoming experts so we can teach our peers about a topic. We read a lot about frogs this week, and so we drew frogs this week after becoming experts on the differences between frogs and toads. The students have really enjoyed choosing topics to read about and teaching their peers about what they’ve learned, and I’ve learned lots about interesting animals, vehicles, and many other topics already!
Our class has officially completed more than 5000 minutes of home reading, so we got to have a PJ Day in 3B on Wednesday! It was the perfect weather to wear cozy outfits, and we even wrapped up our PE basketball unit in style! We’ll keep tracking our home reading in agendas this month to see when we get to have our next PJ Day!
 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 successfully convinced Mrs. Smith with our letters to hold an online book fair which was very exciting, and the students have been looking for noteworthy topics and fixable problems to write about.
We’re working 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!
We’ve been reading and writing poetry this month in Language Arts, and wrote a variety of different types of poetry this past week. The students worked hard to make interesting word choices and tried to paint pictures in their readers’ minds. They are very proud of their variety of poems, and you can see more of your child's poetry on Seesaw
In spite of some changes that had to be made because of pandemic protocols, our class still had a very lively and fun Halloween at school. Students got to wear their costumes all day, which they found quite exciting, and we had quite an array of book characters, video game stars, conniving villains, and many other clever costumes in 3B. We enjoyed doing some artwork and Halloween-themed activities in the morning, and then this afternoon we took part in Millgrove’s virtual Halloween Parade and watched a Halloween movie. I can’t wait to hear about their Halloween weekends when I see the the students next week! |
Mrs. BarkerMrs. Barker is a grade two 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. 
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