We've started a new writing genre in Language Arts this month on biographies! Currently we're focused on researching the life story of a notable person. The students have been very enthusiastic about finding out all sorts of interesting facts about their chosen person, and the biography research is coming along nicely!
We’ve been reading and writing poetry this month 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!
This month in our reading lessons we've been focusing on making predictions about what will happen next in our reading. We've discussed that there's no one right prediction, but predictions need to be reasonable and based on evidence in the text. Some of the predictions we've been practicing in class have included:
The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane has been an excellent book to practice predicting with because it's so suspenseful, and the author often leaves clues about what might happen next! Our class has been captivated for the past several days 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)! This month in our reading we're working on making connections to the text we are reading. These texts can be to our own lives, to another book/movie/song, or to some background knowledge we have. Connecting when reading is an important comprehension strategy that allows readers to make personal connections to the text. It can involves relating the content of the text to the reader's own experiences, thoughts, and emotions which helps to deepen the reader's understanding of the text and make it more meaningful. Connecting when reading also allows readers to engage with the text on a more personal level, making it a more enjoyable experience. The students have been using sticky notes to mark where they made their strongest connection in our class read-aloud, and they've loved sharing what that connection was with the rest of the class!
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 written on a variety of topics in class including their families, favourite season, and favourite toy. 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've been working hard in 3SB this week 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 been working on thinking deeply about our books, and we've started talking about some meta-cognitive strategies such as making connections to help us develop our reading comprehension abilities. Our Writing Workshop this year is starting with a focus on personal 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 class loved getting to hear their peers' writing during our sharing time! The students successfully completed the research and writing for their non-fiction animal books this week! They typed up all their findings in a variety of subtopics, and published their illustrated books to Seesaw! To celebrate we had a well-deserved book publishing party and got to share our reports with each other. It's always satisfying to see our hard work in writing pay off!
We finished off an amazing week at the Winspear Centre with some math, architecture, construction, and an organ demonstration! This morning we planned a pretend budget for a visit to the Winspear including tickets and concession which made for some great math conversations! Mr. Wiley gave us a very special tour of the Winspear's construction site, and then the students created blueprints for their very own planned Winspear addition! Perhaps the unanimous highlight of the day was an organ demonstration. We learned all about the incredible 6,551 pipes on the Davis Pipe organ, how it was constructed, how it works, and we got to hear "Ode to Joy" on the organ. At the end of the day we created a time capsule of our Sound School memories that we'll open when we're in grade four. It's been an incredible week, and it's definitely left an indelible mark on the students! It was another full day at Sound School! We started the morning off hearing the ESO rehearse a piece called "Torque" by Canadian composer Gary Kulesha which had lots of dynamic range (as Miss Stephanie taught us) and similarities to some of John Williams' Star Wars music. It was so fascinating to watch the symphony practice and refine a piece, and their performance was very impressive! After watching the ESO in the Concert Hall, we became art critics and reflected on the many interesting art pieces around the Winspear Centre. After doing a little tour of the Citadel, Canada Place, and the Edmonton Convention Centre, we competed in a scavenger hunt in the afternoon. We ended the day playing music on a pump organ!
We were all over downtown Edmonton today as part of Sound School! We started off the day exploring different instruments from different orchestra instrument families, and students even got to play the violin and accordion. We saw a graduation taking place in the Concert Hall today, and also had a tour of the incredible Stanley Milner Library from librarian Jasper. We learned all about the art of Alex Janvier and his very special art at Rogers Place, and then we performed a choral reading about his art when we visited the actual mosaic piece at Rogers Place. Of course we had to visit the Wayne Gretzky statue while we were at Rogers Place as well!
We had a day full of learning and fun for our first day of Sound School! We learned a new song, explored the Concert Hall, enjoyed Churchill Square, heard all about Dr. Francis Winspear and his legacy, examined the fossils and building materials in the lobby, worked on some Concert Hall estimation and multiplication, and evaluated different seats at the Winspear (the very tippy top Gallery was perhaps the most popular spot). Miss Stephanie took great care of us as we learned, and we can't wait for Day 2!
Happy Mother’s Day! The students were thrilled to take home their Mother’s Day poems this past week that they had worked so hard on. Thank you to all you fantastic 3B moms, grandmas/nanas/omas, aunts, and other wonderful women who love these children so very well!
We had the privilege of watching a performance of The SpongeBob Musical performed by Spruce Grove Composite High School today! The play had music, lots of comedy, and some amazing costumes. Some favourite moments included Pearl singing, Patrick's devoted followers, and SpongeBob's impressive acting. The class wrote reviews of the play when we got back to school, and We Will Rock You garnered high praise from 3B!
To celebrate the students’ completing their poetry anthologies this week, we had a Poetry Café today. We listened to café music, and Mrs. Barker the barista had some sweet treats and chocolate milk prepared for the poets. The class had fun reading their poems to each other (there were lots of laughs), and all the students should be proud of their lovely collections of poetry!
We had a blast sharing our poems with the school today for Poem In Your Pocket Day! Each student memorized a poem this month, and today they recited to their poem to several staff members and students around Millgrove. There were poems that made the audience laugh, others that made them say "awww," and 3B did a great job sharing an appreciation of poetry with the school!
It's national poetry month and we're learning lots about writing poetry in 3B! We've read lots of wonderful and varied poetry, and in our poetry writing we've been learning about how poets write about things that they observe and care about, that poets should pay close attention to the world around them and the feelings inside, and that poets revise their poems as they write. The students have enjoyed reading their poems to each other, and there have been lots of emotive and humorous poetry! Coming up in our writing, we'll learn more about language, form, revision, and building poetry anthologies. You can read some of the poems we've been inspired by here and read some of our poems below!
We've continued to enjoy our read-aloud Tâpwê and the Magic Hat this week! We learned about fry bread and made our own at school with maple sugar that we had read about, and the students analyzed the character Wâpos who is a Trickster. We're learning so much about Indigenous culture through this novel, and having lots of fun while doing so!
There was a great deal of excitement this week over St. Patrick’s Day, and we had our suspicions in 3B that a leprechaun would pay a visit to our classroom before we got there this morning. We wrote persuasive letters on Thursday, some begging Louie to mess up our classroom, some (such as Mrs. Barker's) imploring Louie to have mercy and steer clear of the classroom. As most students wanted, the sneaky Louie the Leprechaun had been in our classroom overnight scattering classroom items, leaving a backwards note, and hiding our shoes around the classroom. He even left a puzzle for us to solve with some candy treats. Let’s hope that next year Louie isn’t quite so sneaky at Millgrove School!
This month we wrapped up our unit on stories! The students each wrote some wonderful climbing stories the course of our unit, and then chose their favourite one to turn into a final draft. They’ve worked hard on using narration, description, dialogue, punctuation, tense, dialogue, and paragraphs to create engaging and sophisticated stories. Many of them were very amusing, and the class was thrilled to wrap up the unit with a celebration of fairy tales and the stories they had written. We also enjoyed some delicious popcorn (thanks to the families who sent popcorn) while we watched Because of Winn-Dixie which we recently finished reading as a class. You can watch some of the fairy tales from around the world that we learned about this week! |
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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