In late November, the students all wrote letters to Santa, and today we got our letter back from him! He sent us a lovely note, including notification that all the students made it onto the nice list! He wrote a specific note to each student from the letters they each wrote to him which was especially thoughtful and special. It was the best mail we could receive a week before before Winter Break! ![]() With the new month came a new writing unit, and we’re now working on changing the world around us with our writing! We’ll be writing persuasive speeches, petitions, and editorials in the coming weeks during our writing time, and the class has been hard at work convincing their audiences of their theses. We are working on changing things in our school and community, and the students have been looking for noteworthy topics and fixable problems to write about. We’ve learned about on developing brave, bold opinions and considering our audience when crafting our arguments. With our recent work on global citizenship in Social Studies, it’s the perfect time for us to be using our writing to change the world around us, whether our school, friends, or community! This month in our reading mini-lessons, we'll be practicing the skill of visualizing as we read! Visualizing is all about making a picture in our minds of what we're reading about. When readers visualize:
We wrote letters to Santa yesterday, and then delivered them using Canada Post's Santa Letter-Writing program today. It's always engaging to write to a meaningful audience, and there are few audiences as exciting as Santa Claus himself! We're hoping that he might write back to us before Christmas time, so we'll keep watching out for some class mail with anticipation!
This week our class, and many other classes at Millgrove, wrote postcards to members of the Canadian Armed Forces to express our gratitude for their important work. The students had many thoughtful and reflective messages to share, and it was meaningful to think of the many ways our armed forces help our citizens and other places around the world. Especially these days, we're grateful for the women and men in those roles who help keep our country, and others, safe.
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!
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Mrs. BarkerMrs. Barker is a grade three and literacy 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
June 2024
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