3B had been working hard in December on Christmas "important books" for their families. We focused on crafting interesting descriptions and making our ideas clear to our audience (who were the students’ families). You can see the original The Important Book below to see our inspiration. The class made the wrapping paper, cards, and everything, and were very proud of their creations. We hope you enjoyed their lovingly authored Christmas books!
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Merry Christmas! Our class of students have been a resilient, hard-working, and conscientious bunch in this unusual school year, and I’m looking forward to what the New Year brings for learning and community in our classroom!
A trailer for the Citadel's production of A Christmas Carol (a different adaptation from the David van Belle one we watched this year) This week we explored a mini-unit on Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol. We read the book, watched this year's Citadel play production (which was available virtually because of the pandemic), and watched the Muppet's film version. The students enjoyed comparing the different adaptations of the story, and examining the history of why Charles Dickens wrote the story and how its message is still important today. To cap off our unit, we played Jeopardy to review our knowledge of the story and the students earned an impressive $3300 (not that the money matters so much, as we learned from Ebenezer Scrooge of course). It was lovely to see the class embrace the Christmas spirit and remember the importance of kindness and generosity this week! This week some enthusiastic members of our class created a reader's theatre production of Beauty and the Beast at their own initiative. They worked on rereading to develop fluency, speaking with expression and phrasing, and accurately portraying characters when practicing the script for their acting productions. They created some beautiful class, and their classmates gave them a unanimous 5/5 stars for the production!
Today we celebrated Ukrainian Christmas in 3B! We pretended to wait to eat lunch until we saw the first star outside (as some Ukrainians would do to remember the wise men following the star), and learned how to say Merry Christmas in Ukrainian (Veseloho Rizvda or Веселого Різдва). We decorated our classroom with a Didukh that symbolises the large wheat fields in Ukraine and means 'grandfather spirit' to signify people's ancestors being with them in their memories. The students went caroling like many Ukrainians do (singing “'Koliadky”), and we listened to the famous Ukrainian carol “Schedryk” (it has the same melody as “Carol of the Bells”). We set up our own class nativity scene like Ukrainian families would often do, and made our own spider web decorations like Ukrainian children sometimes make to decorate their houses at Christmas. We read the beautiful book The Christmas Spider’s Miracle to learn about why spiders are so important to some Ukrainian people at Christmas and why there are often spider decorations on their Christmas trees. Finally, we drank some apple juice to pretend we were having uzvar, which is a national Ukrainian beverage, cooked with dried fruits and berries. Веселого Різдва! Today we went Christmas shopping in 3B! Given the students' growing skills with three-digit addition and subtraction, they were given a mission to make a selection of toys and other items for themselves with a budget of $1000 using some flyers. All the students stayed within the budget (except for a few who felt confident to add beyond $1000), and their selections and adding strategies were varied and impressive. We look forward to planing more shopping trips with our math skills!
In Social Studies this month, we began a new unit on the country of India! With 1.3 billion people, India has so much for us to learn about. We’ve been talking a lot about the geography, climate, wildlife and resources of India, and are looking forward to learning more about India’s languages, customs, traditions, and celebrations. You can click on this link to see some of the places we’ve explored in India, and watch the videos to learn more about this amazing country! In our measurement unit, we've been honing our skills in measuring mass in grams and kilograms. The students especially looked forward to estimating mass before we measured it using the scales we had in the classroom this week.
We bid a sad farewell to Miss Gartner, our student teacher, today! We have learned so much from her, enjoyed her warmth and kindness, and appreciated all that she has done for us over the past few months. We're looking forward to keeping in touch with her when she's back at university, and know that she will be an amazing teacher when she graduates in the spring!
We’re almost done reading our most recent read aloud, The Wild Robot by Peter Brown. The class has grown quite fond of the robot protagonist Roz and her gosling son Brightbill, and they are very particular about how I read Roz’s dialogue in the book (it must be strictly monotone with no expression). Some students have already started to read the sequel in our class, and we can’t wait to find out what happens to Roz at the book’s conclusion!
In the true spirit of this season, a local mom is organizing support for some of the long-term care centres by sending cards to the residents. Our class happily pitched in this week by writing cards to the seniors with notes of encouragement, and sweet tidbits of information about the students' favourite Christmas traditions and their artwork. In a year that has been particularly challenging for our community's older citizens, we hope it can brighten their Christmas!
We're learning about empathy this month at Millgrove, and some of the tangible ways we've put our empathy into practice included contributing to our school's giving tree to provide warm clothes to families in need, donating toys and gift cards to the Christmas hampers, and writing cards to seniors in our community. You can watch a couple of the videos below for more thoughts on empathy! The students of 2B have been busy elves the past few weeks as they've been preparing their Christmas presents! They're all wrapped up now, and the class can't wait to give their gifts to their families at Christmas. Their love and care for their families was very evident in all the effort they put into this (top secret) project!
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 we’re using lots these days: masks! This week, the students were excited to crack out their rulers and begin our unit on the measurement of time, length, perimeter, and mass!
In this unit, the students will:
Here are some activities you can try with your child:
As we continue to practice our persuasive writing skills in our current writing unit, we delved in the genre of advertisements. The students researched the history of ugly Christmas sweaters and then set to work designing their own ugly Christmas sweaters and detailing numerous convincing reasons that their audience should purchase that sweater. The advertisements were truly convincing, and there are some cunning businesspeople in the making in our class!
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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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