The students have become more comfortable with having an informed estimate that doesn't exactly match their subsequent count. In grade three, students use referents to help inform their estimates of amounts up to 1000! You can see photos of some of our math activities from the past week, and click on the game below to practice more estimation.
We've been practicing our estimating skills in 3B this week, and the students put those skills to use on our Participark walk today! 3K joined us on our walk to collet leaves, and we secretly made piles of leaves with different amounts, and then used referent piles to estimate the amount of leaves. The students had some impressively accurate estimates! The students have become more comfortable with having an informed estimate that doesn't exactly match their subsequent count. In grade three, students use referents to help inform their estimates of amounts up to 1000! You can see photos of some of our math activities from the past week, and click on the game below to practice more estimation.
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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 chosen a "seed" writing piece that we will continue to revise and edit in the coming weeks. 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 seemed likely to meet 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. Our class helped to make the assembly video for this year's run, which you can see above!
In our continuing work for Jess Geo this week, we learned about a variety of properties of minerals and conducted some tests to describe our minerals' properties. Very excitingly, we were able to identify the minerals sulfur and muscovite for Jess Geo today using the properties of smell, streak colour, light properties, colour, and texture! We hope that she will be impressed by our work, and we'll get to learn about more properties of minerals next week.
As we continue our learning about maps and practice creating our own masks, we learned about pirate maps this week and made our own maps along with directions to retrieve buried treasure. We’re learning about how to create and use a simple map, use cardinal and intermediate directions, and apply the terms hemisphere, poles, and equator. You can watch the video below for more ideas on how to draw a pirate map! Our class has been captivated this week by the chapter book The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane, which we just started reading. It is about a vain, self-absorbed stuffed rabbit who finds himself on a fantastical adventure. The book has many surprising twists and turns, and we've used the book this week to practice our reading skills of making predictions, using clues from the text to infer, and checking for understanding. We can't wait to find out what happens next to Edward (I am asked multiple times each day if we will be reading Edward Tulane soon)! We’ve been digging deep into our science learning about rocks and minerals this week! We’ve worked on classifying and sorting objects, tapping into our geological background knowledge, and now we’ve been tasked with the very important mission of helping geologist Jess Geo from the Royal Alberta Museum. Jess has asked us to help sort some minerals that got jumbled up in transit, and we started our mission this week by creating diagrams for her of each of the ten minerals. In our unit on Rocks and Minerals this term, we’ll be learning lots of important concepts about materials that make up the Earth’s crust:
Students are welcome to bring interesting rocks or minerals from home to share with the class during our science class. They've already bringing some in to share, and there have some very cool specimens so far! Our class (and many other Millgrove students) have been enthusiastically observing a baby bat that has been hanging out on the side of our school this week. We love being at our school, so it’s no surprise that the bat feels the same way!
Our long-awaited classroom is now ready! I set up our new room last night, and we’re already enjoying the beautiful space with big windows, brand new bathrooms, and lots of space to learn and have fun together! I can't wait to make lots of memories in this room together.
We started our focus on increasing patterns in math this week. Increasing patterns can often prove to be tricky, but the students in 3B have worked hard to describe, reproduce, extend, and create increasing patterns over the past week. You can practice increasing patterns by taking the link to the game below
Today we celebrated Dot Day in 3B! 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 3B 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 students' beautiful art, information about the artist Kandinsky who our art was inspired by, and the book "The Dot" below 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, and we enjoyed talking about our imaginary travels, listening to Hawaiian music, and taking lots of pretend touristy photos. Our year of global learning is off to a great (and hilarious) start!
We went on our first adventure to the Participark today, and the students braved the heat to practice some mapping and rock-hunting skills. We brought unlabeled maps of the Participark, and students labeled them with different notable landmarks and features, using our knowledge of cardinal directions and bird’s eye view maps. We also explored the park for rocks, and each student found a rock to bring back to the school and examine as part of our Rocks & Minerals unit this term. All in all, it was a hot but successful first trip to the Participark!
Our class is beginning a math unit on Numbers to 1000, 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:
We've been working hard in 3B over the last couple of weeks 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 especially enjoyed reading on the Chromebook at the end of this week and keeping track of how much they're reading in their reading log. Our Writing Workshop this year is starting with a focus on 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 students love getting to hear their peers' writing during our sharing time! To kick off our writing in grade three, each student wrote a postcard to a Millgrove staff member this week! Students told their recipient about their past few months, what they thought about school, and asked questions about the recipients summer. It will be exciting when we get some responses back in our mailbox! You can see your child's postcard on Seesaw.
This month we’re learning about numbers from 1 to 1000, and today we tested out our knowledge of those numbers by making a giant number line on the tarmac with chalk! We had to be thoughtful about the order of different three digit numbers, and the students enjoyed racing to the approximate spot of different numbers on the number line
What a great set of first days! It was a pleasure to meet all the lovely new students of 3B (and see some familiar faces as well)! I am thrilled to be teaching grade three this year, and I can tell it's going to be a great year with this group of children! They're doing a great job learning our new health and safety protocols, and are demonstrating patient and considerate behaviour as we navigate new routines at school. We have a few students new to Millgrove in our room so we got to show them around our school, 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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