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! ![]() Our class has been enthralled this week by the chapter book Tâpwê and the Magic Hat, which we just started reading. It is by Cree author and songwriter Buffy Sainte-Marie, and is inspired by Indigenous traditions. The boy Tâpwê lives on a prairie reserve and is gifted a magic hat by his kohkom (grandmohter). So far, it seems like Tâpwê is about to embark on quite the adventure! We are very lucky to be working Parkland School Division's Indigenous Education Coordinator Geri Wu on this novel study, and we've already learned so much about Indigenous culture. You may have heard of March Madness, but 3B is taking part in a book tournament called March Book Madness this month. There is a bracket of 16 entertaining and interesting picture books, and we have enjoyed reading the selections. We start voting this week to see which books move on in the tournament. The students have their different favourites, but so far the most popular books have been Blue, Runs With the Stars, Gibberish, There Are No Bears In This Bakery, The Cool Bean, and Endlessly Ever After. We’ll keep you posted on which books make it to the next round of March Book Madness!
Today we celebrated Family Literacy Day at Millgrove! Since 1999, thousands of schools, libraries, literacy organizations and other community groups have taken part in the initiative. We were lucky to have many guests read to our class this month, and today we enjoyed cozying up in our PJs, buddy reading, and listening to stories read by some of our parents. There are so many ways to enjoy reading! Taking time every day to read or do a learning activity with children is crucial to a child’s development, improving a child’s literacy skills dramatically, and can help a parent improve their skills as well. Thanks to all the special guests who read to us this month!
As Millgrove celebrates a focus on literacy this month, our class has been lucky to have special guest readers come and read picture books to our class. You can find out more about Family Literacy Day here (which we will be enjoying with a PJ Day next Friday). We're looking forward to a few more special reading guests next week!
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 the Citadel's David van Belle Citadel play production (which was also available virtually again this year), 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 amount (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! 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! It was the best mail we could receive right before Winter Break!
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! ![]() 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! We wrote letters to Santa today, and then delivered them using Canada Post's Santa Letter-Writing program. 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!
We’ve been reading and writing Halloween poetry this week 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 week we got to start something very exciting: meeting with our buddy class 1C! Ms. Careless' class is very kind and sweet, and we really enjoyed reading to them during our buddy time. The students carefully chose and practiced reading picture books in advance of our buddy time, and I think the grade one students enjoyed hearing all the carefully selected stories. We can't wait to see them again next time!
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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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