Our class has been captivated this week 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)! |
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! This year for our spelling program in grade three, we will be using The Fountas & Pinnell Comprehensive Phonics, Spelling, and Word Study Guide. This resource is a systematic approach to teaching students about the crucial components for reading and writing words, including:
So far this week we've been working on consonant clusters (which are part of letter-sound relationships) and onsets and rimes (which are part of word-solving actions). Last week we completed a spelling inventory to determine individual students' developmental spelling level, and while we won't be writing spelling tests every week in 3B, I will be assessing students' reading and spelling over the course of the year to keep track of their progress. You can see some of our activities from this week in the photos below!
To kick off our writing in grade three, each student wrote a postcard to a Millgrove staff member this week! Students told their recipient about their past few months, what they thought about school, and asked questions about the recipient's summer. It will be exciting when we get some responses back in our mailbox! You can see your child's postcard on Seesaw.
Our class won our grade’s Spellathon fundraiser this year, so they have been eagerly anticipating the opportunity to pie Mrs. Barker. That moment finally came when Austen got to enact this pie attack, and needless to say, the class was delighted! Among Us is incredibly popular with some of the students in our class, so this week we had a couple of days to have some fun with that theme. We wrote using an Among Us prompt, played a real-life Among Us Math Scavenger Hunt, and completed some challenging Math missions in an online Among Us format. The students enjoyed creating their own avatars, completing the Math tasks, and figuring out who the imposters were. It was a fun way to review some of our learning from this year!
With the extraordinarily hot weather this week, our class spent some time reading outside in the cooler mornings. We got to have our guided reading groups on picnic blankets, 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 lots of practice with that this week in the wonderful outdoors!
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 juice 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!
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!
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, poets should pay close attention to the world around them and the feelings inside, and poets revise their poems as they write. The students have enjoyed reading their poems to each other, and reading reading poems to our chicks! 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!
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 the library! Mrs. Smith added barcodes and put our books in the library catalogue so that the rest of the school can take them out. 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!
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!
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 book has been Our Place in the Universe. We’ll keep you posted on which books make it to the next round of March Book Madness!
Our latest writing unit is about figures of speech and how we can incorporate them into our writing. So far, we’ve have an introduction to similes, metaphors, and oxymora, and next week 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 writing pieces next week! This week we wrapped up our unit on writing fairy tales! The students each wrote three 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!
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!
A group of students this week practiced and performed a riveting reader's theatre of Cinderella today! It was very fitting for our recent exploration of Cinderella and various adaptations of that story in our fairy tale unit, and the play was entertaining and well-received by the audience! |
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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