mrsbarker.ca - Millgrove 3B

Christmas Cards for Canadian Armed Forces

12/2/2021

In the true spirit of this season, some Millgrove students are writing to members of our Canadian Armed Forces. Our class talked especially about people serving in the Armed Forces who might be away from home or had difficult assignments this year, and we remembered events like B.C. floods and busy hospitals this year where members of the Armed Forces provided important help. 3B happily pitched in this week by writing cards to them with notes of encouragement, sweet tidbits of information about the students' favourite Christmas traditions, and their artwork. For this group of people who help our country so much, we hope it can brighten their Christmas!

The One and Only Ivan

11/24/2021

We’re part way through our most recent read aloud, The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate The class has grown quite fond of the gorilla protagonist Ivan and his crew of animal friends, and we're curious to learn more about how Ivan ended up at the Big Top Mall, and his plan to make things better for him and his friends.

Winter Landscapes

11/23/2021

This week we made monochromatic landscape art inspired by our recent snowy outdoors! The students had fun represented the snows in different ways, and you can see your child's art piece on Seesaw. Watch the video below to see how the artist Simon Beck made his own type of art with snow!

Letters to Santa

11/19/2021

We wrote letters to Santa today, and then delivered them using Canada Post's Santa Letter-Writing program. 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!

Arches, Hypotheses, and Fair Tests

11/18/2021

We’ve been learning all about fair tests, hypotheses, beams, pillars, materials, and conclusions in Science these days! You can check out the photos of some of our experiments, and watch the video to see a fair test of something people are using lots these days: masks!

Measuring Height and Plant Life Cycles

11/18/2021

In grade three, we learn about measuring height in centimetres (and metres) and we also learn about the life cycles. To get started on these learning outcomes, this week we got some amaryllis plants in our classroom, with special help from the families of Rowen, Bruce, and Nathan! 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!

Snowy Walk

11/17/2021

We got to enjoy the first snowy week of this school year with a walk in the woods! The class enjoyed playing hide and seek amongst the trees and exploring the sights, sounds, and smells of the changing weather. We've also highly enjoyed the snow at recess this week (except for the long trudge to and from our recess zones)!

Floor Hockey

11/17/2021

This week we've been honing our hockey skills in PE by practicing some floor hockey drills and games. Hockey is a very popular sport in our class, so many of the students have been elated to show off their hockey moves in the gym!

Non-Fiction Reading

11/5/2021

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 bit 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!

Remembering

11/5/2021

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 this Mondayin 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.

Diwali

11/4/2021

We celebrated Diwali in our class today, which is one of the most celebrated festivals in India! It is a Hindu holiday that is usually observed for five days, and we learned about some of the traditions and activities that make Diwali special. We made our own paper versions of rangoli and cleaned our classroom because many Indians believe that the Goddess Lakshmi only steps inside if your home is clean. We played games, enjoyed some sweets, and enjoyed lunch with some special lights (because Diwali is the festival of lights). You can watch the videos below to learn more about Diwali!

Non-Fiction Writing

11/3/2021

With the new month came a new writing unit, and we’re now working on teaching others about our areas of expertise! Our current writing unit is all about informational writing. Students have chosen a topic to write about, and so far we've planned our table of contents and have begun to write our chapters. We've talked about different text structures in non-fiction books such as boxes and bullets, causes and effects, problems and solutions, pros and cons, and compare-and-contrast. The class has already learned a lot about each others' topics, and there's so much background knowledge that we're benefiting from in 3B this month!

Testing Materials and Designs

11/2/2021

This week we started our new Science unit on Testing Materials and Designs! Miss Gramson is getting the students all set up to test a variety of materials and designs, and the students have already learned a lot about different structures!

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:

Recognize that functional structures must be sufficiently strong and stable and that unstable or weak structures are often unsafe to use

Compare and evaluate the strength and stability of different models or objects constructed
Describe the distinctive properties of some common solids, such as wood, paper or plastic, that make them suitable for use as building materials
Apply procedures to test the strength of construction materials, in particular, different stocks of papers, plastics or wood
Apply procedures to test different designs. 6. Apply procedures to test the strength of different methods of joining
Identify and apply methods for making a structure stronger and more stable; e.g., by adding or joining parts to form triangles

Halloween Celebration

10/29/2021

In spite of some limitations that we had 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 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!

Halloween Poetry

10/28/2021

We’ve been reading and writing poetry this week 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!

Learning about Soil and Calcium Carbonate

10/27/2021

This week, our class learned about different materials that make up soil, namely minerals, air, water, and organic material, and students enjoyed contrasting the textures, appearances, and components of the peat moss, clay, and sand that we compared in class.
We also learned about one of the most common chemicals on Earth: calcium carbonate. We talked about the many uses of this chemical, and its prevalence in many rocks and minerals like calcite and calcium carbonate. Our class tested for calcium carbonate's presence in chalk, shells, and limestone using acid and we found it present in all three!

Addition and Subtraction up to 1000

10/26/2021

In Math this past week, we are starting a new unit on addition and subtraction. Your child will develop strategies for adding and subtracting whole numbers by using open number lines, addition charts, mental math, estimation, Base Ten Blocks, place-value mats, and pencil and paper.

In this unit, your child will:

Recall basic addition and subtraction facts
Identify and apply relationships between addition and subtraction
Add and subtract 2-digit numbers
Use mental math to add and subtract
Estimate sums and differences
Add and subtract 3-digit numbers

The ability to use a variety of strategies to add and subtract leads to the development to a strong sense of number.

Here are some suggestions for activities you can engage in with your child:

Play Store with your child. Price some of the items in your home in cents (for example, the cup of noodles costs 149 cents and the baguette costs 35 cents). You are the Shopper and your child is the Cashier. Have your child add the cost of the items you buy.
Roll a die 4 times. Use the numbers rolled to make two 2-digit numbers. Have your child subtract the lesser number from the greater number. Repeat the activity. This time, roll the number cube 6 times and make two 3-digit numbers.

The Royal Alexandra ER

10/25/2021

We are lucky to have a connection to the Royal Alexandra ER through the mom of one of our students (Rowen), and she sent along some lovely photos of her and her colleagues with the cards we made for them! She also sent along this message with some interesting facts about the ER:

Did you know for every 8 hour work shift we have approximately;
28 Registered Nurses
4 Doctors
2 Respiratory Therapists
2 Licensed Practical Nurses
1 Ortho Tech
2 Health Care Aides
3 Service Aides
2 Social Workers
3 Unit Clerks
3 Housekeeping staff

It takes ALL of these people to run our Emergency Department and we work together as a team to take care of all of our patients. This team is required to make sure everything from the patient rooms being clean and stocked full of equipment all the way to life saving measures by our medical team. It truly takes a BIG group effort! We have approximately 68 beds in our Emergency Department. I attached a picture of what we wear going into each and every patients room to keep ourselves protected as well as our patients protected. I love being a Registered Nurse!

The class was so thrilled to see these photos and hear from Rowen's mom and Justin's mom from the Misericordia ICU, and we continue to be so grateful for all these health care professionals' work. There were many aspiring nurses in our class after learning more about their important jobs!

The Scream

10/23/2021

In a month that we often associate with fear, we were inspired to paint like Edvard Munch and make our very own versions of his piece “The Scream.” We learned about Munch’s history as an artist, and looked at many examples of other artists’ adaptations of “The Scream.” The students painted their own background of a sunset on the fjord, and posed with their best poses of terror. Their expressions were simply wonderful, as you can see below!

The Rock Cycle

10/22/2021

This week in Science we’ve been learning all about the rock cycle, and the three types of rocks: igneous, sedimentary, and metamorphic. Jess Geo sent us a video message responding to a message that our student Taylor had sent her, and she gave us lots of useful information about different igneous rocks! You can see her video below. We looked at examples of each type of rock and examined their properties just like a geologist. You can check out the extra videos below to learn a bit more about rocks and how they are formed!