We’ve been keeping busy with reading and writing in Language Arts this past week, and the students have been learning lots about how to make their writing clear and interesting. In addition to our personal narrative writing this week, we read some non-fiction books about turkeys and wrote plans to care for a prospective turkey pet. There were some very entertaining ideas for how to pass the time with one’s pet turkey. Happy Thanksgiving!
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. 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!
3B was full of book characters today as we celebrated Book Hero Day at Millgrove! We have many enthusiastic readers in our class, so unsurprisingly there were many enthusiastic book heroes in our room (and the rest of the school)!
With the lovely weather this week, our class spent some time reading outside. We got to have our guided reading groups at the picnic tables, and the class had fun with the change of scenery. As we’ve learned this year, one of the most important parts about developing a reading life is finding and getting settled in the perfect reading spot, so we had some nice practice with that reading outdoors!
Our writing project this week was to write a story based on the book "Where's My Hockey Sweater." Students worked on having a clear story structure, rich vocabulary, and a funny catchphrase. You can see some of the results below!
The students successfully completed the research and writing for their non-fiction animal books this month! They typed up all their findings in a variety of subtopics, so to celebrate we had a well-deserved book publishing party and got to share our reports with each other (and watched Born to Be Wild about orangutans and elephants). It's always satisfying to see our hard work in writing pay off!
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!
As part of our poetry unit, this week Miss Smith taught us about some Indigenous perspectives on the northern lights, and we wrote poetry and made art inspired by this sky phenomenon. You can watch the video below to see a northern lights legend! 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!
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.
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! Currently 3B is learning about classic and fractured fairy tales in our writing time. Fractured fairy tales are based on classic fairy tales, but the setting, characters, problem, solution, or some other element of the story are changed. The students have had great fun reading a variety of fractured fairy tales, and are working on their own fairy tale adaptations during writing time. We’ve been talking about how to write with cohesion, write with a clear story structure, balance narration with description and dialogue, and plan our scenes with story-planning booklets. 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 next 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 Every Night is Pizza Night, Except Antarctica, and Norman Didn't Do It. We’ll keep you posted on which books make it to the next round of March Book Madness!
Our class has cherished watching and cheering for Canada in the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics over the past three weeks, and there have been many teachable moments as we saw athletes have great success, but also some heartbreaking moments. The students each researched an Olympic sport and athlete to write about, and did some creative writing in which they invented their own winter Olympic sport. We also had fun exploring the math and science of the winter Olympics, and learning a bit about other countries in the context of our grade three global citizenship learning in Social Studies. It's a bit sad seeing the games come to a close this weekend, but we sure have had fun and learned lots from the Beijing Olympics! |
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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