Blog Archives - mrsbarker.ca

Estimation at the Participark

9/29/2020

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.

Writing Personal Narratives

9/26/2020

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!

Terry Fox Run

9/25/2020

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!

Mystery Mineral Identification

9/24/2020

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.

Pirate Maps

9/24/2020

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!

The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane

9/23/2020

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)!

Rocks and Minerals

9/18/2020

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:

Compare samples of various kinds of rock, and identify similarities and differences.
Given a description of the properties of a particular rock or mineral, identify a sample rock or mineral that matches those properties. Properties that students should be able to describe and interpret include:
- colour
- lustre or “shininess”; e.g., shiny, dull,
- glassy, metallic, earthy
- texture; e.g., rough, smooth, uneven
- hardness, based on scratch tests with
- available materials
- presence of carbonates.
Describe and classify a group of rocks and minerals, based upon the above properties.
Recognize that rocks are composed of a variety of materials; and given a coarse-grained rock and magnifier, describe some of the component materials.
Recognize and describe the various components within a sample of soil; e.g., clay, sand, pebbles, decaying plants; and describe differences between two different soil samples.
Describe ways in which rocks break down to become soil, and demonstrate one or more of these ways; e.g., by shaking a group of small, soft rocks in a jar of water; by striking rocks together.
Describe some common uses of rocks and minerals; and identify examples of those uses within the school, home or local community.

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!

Honorary Millgrove Bat

9/17/2020

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 Brand New Room!

9/16/2020

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.

Growing Patterns

9/16/2020

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