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!
The students have been thrilled by our recent learning about Ukraine! We have learned about mysterious ancient coins, the story of Chernobyl, the history of Ukraine in the Soviet Union, along with many other interesting aspects of Ukrainian culture and quality of life. Recently each student researched a different Ukrainian dish to add to our class' Ukrainian Recipe Book! They also created an art depiction of that dish to illustrate the book inspired by the mosaics in Ukraine's train stations. It was a fun way to learn about these cultural foods and how they're made. You can see our recipe book below!
We had the privilege of watching the musical We Will Rock You performed by Spruce Grove Composite High School today! The play had music, lots of comedy, and some amazing costumes. One of our class' favourite moments of the play was singing, stomping, and clapping along to the song "We Will Rock You" and of course "Bohemian Rhapsody" at the end. The class wrote reviews of the play when we got back to school, and We Will Rock You garnered high praise from 3B! You can see your child's review on Seesaw.
We were very this lucky this week to have the chicken lady deliver a bunch of eggs for our class! The eggs are settled into the incubator now where they're toasty warm and carefully rotating. This will be the next component of our Science unit on Animal Life Cycles. Next week we're going to take a peek inside by candling the eggs, and in the coming weeks the chicks will start to peck their ways out of their shells! The class is already eagerly observing the chicks' progress! 3B has been working hard in our look at 2D shapes and 3D objects in Math this week. Geometric shapes are all around us, and mathematics can help your child recognize them. Understanding geometric form will help your child appreciate the geometry found in art, design, architecture, and nature.
In this unit, the students will:
You can encourage your child to look for geometric shapes and objects around the home and neighbourhood, and talk about them. Here are some suggestions for activities that you can do at home:
So far we’ve learned how to describe and compare shapes and objects using words like vertices, edges, faces, and length. You can see some of our explorations in the pictures below! 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. Check out Seesaw to read some of your child's poetry!
In anticipation of our Animal Life Cycles unit in Science, our class did some pretend shopping to prepare for a pretend pet that our class would purchase. Some students chose supplies for snakes, others for cats, and of course many bought supplies for dogs. When they'd selected their purchases (and made up a few items that weren't available in our printed selections), they had to add up the total sum of their shopping, using rounding and addition to figure out the total. It's always fun to practice Math with some real life connections!
As part of our Ukrainian Easter celebrations this week, our class played the egg tapping game played by many people in Ukraine and other European countries. My aunt from Greece taught me the game, my son's teacher plays it with her Ukrainian family, and Mrs. Woloszyn's husband plays it with his family who have Polish roots! To play, we held either the pointy or round end of our hard-boiled egg to the egg of another person in hopes that the other person's egg (and not yours) will crack. Emmett was our pointy egg champion, and Ethan was our round egg champion! After our class, and many other classes at Millgrove, wrote postcards to members of the Canadian Armed Forces this past Christmas, it was exciting when the school received a lovely postcard back from a soldier who wrote to us from where she is stationed in Latvia! Especially these days, we're grateful for the women and men in those roles who help keep our country, and others, safe.
As part of our current unit on Ukraine, this week we celebrated Easter Ukrainian style by decorating eggs (or “pysanky”). The students used kitskas and beeswax to create designs on their eggs, and we used real Ukrainian dyes. It was very exciting to see how they turned out after we’d melted all the wax off. з Великоднем! (Happy Easter)! As part of our upcoming unit on animal life cycles, our class received a delivery of a mantis ootheca (eggs) that will hopefully hatch sometime in the coming months! We needed to transplant the ootheca to a humid environment, and we have some flightless fruit flies ready for the hatchlings to snack on once they emerge. The class has been dutifully checking on the ootheca everyday since it arrived! You can watch the video below to see a mantis laying an ootheca of eggs. This week the class started practicing some skills in Pickleball, which is a sport with quickly growing popularity! Next week we'll try playing some games which the students are excited for. You can see more about Pickleball below! For the next couple of months in Social Studies our class will be focusing on the country of Ukraine! So far the students have noticed that Ukraine has some features in common with Canada, and the class particularly enjoyed learning the game "Tzurki Palki" outside. Ukrainian sports, industries, and communities have been interesting so far, and in the next week we'll get to learn lots about Ukrainian culture. ми не можемо чекати (we can't wait)!
It was a treat to visit to the Participark this week with our warm temperatures (plus, the trees shielded us from most of the strong winds)! We spotted a squirrel, some pussy willows, and some signs of new life in the woods. As always, the students favourite was exploring the woods and playing Hide and Seek!
Our latest writing unit is about figures of speech and how we can incorporate them into our writing. So far, we’ve had an introduction to similes, metaphors, and oxymora, and coming up we’ll learn about hyperbole, understatement, euphemisms, and personification. The students especially loved learning about sports metaphors and writing some “trash talk” for their own pretend teams using metaphors, and they enjoyed looking for similes and oxymorons in music and movies. Their writing including these figures of speech has been lively and imaginative, and it will be fun to see them use all seven figures of speech in their upcoming writing pieces! This week we wrapped up our unit on writing fairy tales! The students each wrote a few fairy tales over 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. You can watch some of the fairy tales from around the world that we learned about this week as well and see a couple of examples of the students’ fairy tales!
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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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