To wrap up our opinion writing this term, students each selected one of the theses they had written about to turn into a speech. Each student shared their speech with the class, and each of them made some convincing and impassioned points! The class worked hard to start their speeches with a bold thesis, provide a variety of reasons, directly address the audience, and include personal anecdotes. By the end, we had been convinced that Rogers Place needs more food options, we should take better care of the environment, and that Millgrove School should install a pool in our building! |
The students have really loved playing the game Wordle in Language Arts, and Nerdle in Math over the past couple of weeks! Wordle is a word game that gives players six attempts to guess a five-letter word, and Nerdle is a numbers game where players need to figure out the mystery equation. The students look forward to solving the puzzles every day, and we have some very skilled spellers and mathematicians in 3B!
![]() In the month of February we'll be learning and practicing how to write in cursive, and the class has been very eager to show off their handwriting skills! We've been working on a letter or two a day, and now that we have a repertoire of several letters they've really enjoyed putting the letters together to write words. The cursive letters are looking very neat and fancy in 3B so far! You can watch the video below to see some students who aren't quite as confident as our 3B hand-writers... ![]() Our class was so lucky today to get to chat with the author Marty Chan! We have been reading his novel Barnabas Bigfoot and the students were very eager to hear about his writing process and what inspired him to write the book we've been reading. We found out that Marty Chan is just as funny as his books, and the class loved hearing all about his interests and asking him their questions. Perhaps one of the students of 3B will be an author one day!
![]() 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!
3B had been working hard in December on Christmas "important books" for their families. We focused on crafting interesting descriptions and making our ideas clear to our audience (who were the students’ families). You can see the original The Important Book below to see our inspiration. The class made the wrapping paper, cards, and everything, and were very proud of their creations. We hope you enjoyed their lovingly authored Christmas books! 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!
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! The students have been hard at work over the past couple of months reading and writing non-fiction, and to celebrate we watched the true-story-inspired One and Only Ivan after reading the book in class. Rowen's family sent some delicious popcorn and treats, and the class enjoyed reading their non-fiction masterpieces to each other before the movie. As a class, we'd learned about how our non-fiction writing should teach others, and we certainly learned a lot from each other today! ![]() In the true spirit of this season, some Millgrove students are writing to members of our Canadian Armed Forces. Our class talked especially about people serving in the Armed Forces who might be away from home or had difficult assignments this year, and we remembered events like B.C. floods and busy hospitals this year where members of the Armed Forces provided important help. 3B happily pitched in this week by writing cards to them with notes of encouragement, sweet tidbits of information about the students' favourite Christmas traditions, and their artwork. For this group of people who help our country so much, we hope it can brighten their Christmas! We’re part way through our most recent read aloud, The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate The class has grown quite fond of the gorilla protagonist Ivan and his crew of animal friends, and we're curious to learn more about how Ivan ended up at the Big Top Mall, and his plan to make things better for him and his friends.
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! In reading for the next couple of months we’ll be shifting our focus to reading non-fiction texts! Our unit will be all about reading to learn, grasping main ideas, and accessing text structures. So far we’ve worked on previewing our books, identifying the main idea, extracting key points, and becoming experts so we can teach our peers about a topic. We read a bit about frogs this week, and so we drew frogs this week after becoming experts on the differences between frogs and toads. The students have really enjoyed choosing topics to read about and teaching their peers about what they’ve learned, and I’ve learned lots about interesting animals, vehicles, and many other topics already!
We’ve been reading and writing 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!
We wrapped up our writing unit on writing about small moments this week by publishing our seed stories that the class has been working so hard on! The class typed up their stories on the Chromebook, edited and revised them, and then illustrated them. To celebrate our published stories, the students got to enjoy a sweet treat, read their stories to a buddy, and we watched the movie The Fantastic Flying Books of Sir Morris Lessmore all about the magic of books and writing. We’ve now sent our writing to Mrs. Smith who is adding barcodes to them so that they become books in the Millgrove Library that the rest of the school can check out and read! As our class was reflecting on Thanksgiving this week, one of the topics we touched on was how lucky we are to have the health care professionals who are taking extra care of our province in this pandemic season. To try to pass along a small token of our gratitude, we wrote cards to different people that our class is connected to who are helping during this pandemic. We especially wrote cards to the ICU at the Misericordia Hospital and the Emergency Department at the Royal Alexandra Hospital because two students in our class have special connections to those hospitals who were kind enough to deliver some cards to their colleagues. 3B wishes you a very happy Thanksgiving!
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 chosen a "seed" writing piece that we will continue to revise and edit in the coming weeks. 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!
|
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
Categories
All
|