We commemorated Orange Shirt Day today to remember and recognize children who were affected by residential schools in Canada's past. The students showed great compassion and respect, and we had excellent conversations about how we can ensure that children are never treated like that again in our country. We spent the day watching a Peace Pipe Ceremony, listening to Elders, learning about mikiwahp (tipis), making some reflective art, & planting tree seeds to honour Indigenous people impacted by the tragedy of residential schools. You can watch the videos below to learn more about Orange Shirt Day. We ran our annual Terry Fox run today and Millgrove seemed likely to meet our fundraising goal! 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!
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 went on our first adventure to the Participark today, and the students enjoyed exploring the sights and sounds and playing and hide and seek in the woods. All in all, it was a warm 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 paying attention to the federal election in 3B since the beginning of the year, and the students are eagerly anticipating finding out how the votes pan out on Monday! We've been viewing news coverage of the election during our current events time in Social Studies, and using the leaders' answers to Student Vote questions to inform our upcoming voting decisions. Perhaps the class' favourite election coverage has been viewing an election poll tracker to evaluate the odds of different governments being formed. Recently there was a 1% chance of a tie between the leading parties which was a fun possibility for the class to consider! On Monday each student will get to vote as part of Canada's Student Vote program along with thousands of other Canadian students, and we'll find out the results of both the federal election and student election on Tuesday!
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. Our year of global learning is off to a great (and hilarious) start!
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 a couple of times and keeping track of how much they're reading. 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! Grade three has one of the most exciting curricula of all the grades because we get to learn about places all around the world! Our Social Studies units in grade three are built around the theme of “Connecting with the World.” We will focus on communities in four countries:
In our first unit, we've been locating the communities on maps and globes and working on reading maps and making maps. We’ll be studying life in the selected cities, towns, and villages in each of the countries. We will learn about:
This unit will help develop an understanding and appreciation for people in other parts of the world. We're looking forward to "traveling the globe" this year in grade three! This year for our spelling program in grade three, we will be using The Fountas & Pinnell Comprehensive Phonics, Spelling, and Word Study Guide. This resource is a systematic approach to teaching students about the crucial components for reading and writing words, including:
So far this week we've been working on consonant clusters (which are part of letter-sound relationships) and onsets and rimes (which are part of word-solving actions). Last week we completed a spelling inventory to determine individual students' developmental spelling level, and while we won't be writing spelling tests every week in 3B, I will be assessing students' reading and spelling over the course of the year to keep track of their progress. You can see some of our activities from this week in the photos below!
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 next week we will be tasked with the very important mission of helping geologist Jess Geo from the Royal Alberta Museum. Jess is asking us to help sort some minerals that got jumbled up in transit, and we will start our mission next week by profiling 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! This month in PE we've been playing some playground activities, cooperative games, and centres in the gym. So far the students especially enjoyed caterpillar traveling and scooters. It's wonderful to see them working 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
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 recipient's summer. It will be exciting when we get some responses back in our mailbox! You can see your child's postcard on Seesaw.
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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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