We commemorated Orange Shirt Day today (and earlier this week as well) 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 week reading Indigenous stories, listening to Elders, learning from Indigenous author Nicola I. Campbell, researching mikiwahp (tipis), making some reflective art, & planting tree seeds in the Participark 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 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. We also spent some time planting tree seeds and remembering all those affected by Canada's residential school system. All in all, it was a meaningful and community-building first trip to the Participark!
In our continuing work for Jess Geo this month, 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 graphite, magnetite, apatite, copper, muscovite, sulfur, talc, quartz, fluorite, obsidian, halite, and hematite for Jess Geo this month using the properties of smell, streak colour, light properties, colour, shape, hardness, lustre, magnetism, and texture! We hope that she will be impressed by our work, and we'll get to learn about the rock cycle next week!
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. We sure felt inspired today by Canadian hero Terry Fox!
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. 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! 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! 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 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!
Our class is beginning a math unit on Numbers to 100 000, 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:
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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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