We finally made it! After a week of excitement we are officially able to relax and enjoy a well deserved Spring Break. Hopefully mother nature cooperates by limiting the snow and cold weather and bringing some spring weather to Calgary. For those of you traveling- safe travels and enjoy your adventures.
Our last week of March felt like a busy one, but then again, most weeks feel busy! We started our week with our Kindergarten buddies. Ms. Hill and I organized an easter egg hunt and each buddy team used clues to find them around the school. There may have been a chocolate egg waiting for team that could find them all! In a belated celebration, we also did some journal writing and math word problems that had a St. Patrick's day theme. Students presented their instruments to the class this week, and I was so impressed by everyone! It is great to see and hear everything that they have learned during our hearing and sound unit. Rubrics were sent home yesterday. Remember, a 2 or higher is grade level. If a rubric has a 2+ or 3+ at the bottom, it means they were super close to achieving a 3 or 4 overall. Thank you parents for supporting your kids at home getting these projects created and to school on time! We ended our week with a visit from an Olympic athlete. Haley Irwin plays on the Canadian women's hockey team and has been to three olympic games, medalling in all three. She came to our school to share her story and her medals with us. We even got to hold them! Students enjoyed cooperative games in gym this week and The Rolling Stones in music. Precorders will be handed out after spring break and students will begin learning how to play them. When we come back after the break we will be diving into some new math concepts, a new science unit and continuing to learn about the four countries we are exploring. We will be continuing with many of our literacy routines, including journal writing, the Words Their Way spelling program and DEAR. We will be evolving our literacy centers into literature circles. This will allow students to focus in on different comprehension strategies and continue to develop independence in their decoding skills. We will also have swimming starting April 9 and a new round of clubs starting in April. I hope everyone has a wonderful break, see you in April! Ms.Brett Happy Friday!
It was great to see so many of you at our sharing assembly today, thank you for coming! I was so proud of everyone, especially our readers who shared their writing. An audience of over 600 people can be a scary thing and they all did so great. This week was the last week of drumfit for all students, next week we will be back to our regular music and gym schedule. Students can look forward to a new artist of the week: The Rolling Stones! Often in competition with The Beatles over “greatest band of all time”, The Rolling Stones left their own mark on the brit-rock world and well as the international rock and roll scene. They played a vital roll in the “blues-rock” movement created by fellow English bands that helped bring the blues into the mainstream. We celebrated Pi day this week by doing some Pi themed math and baking apple pies. Thank you again to the parent volunteers who made that afternoon possible. I think everyone had a lot of fun making the pies and learning about what goes into planning for and actually making something from scratch. Today we ate our pie as we watched a new Magic School Bus episode about rocks. In Math we continue to work with multiplication and division. We learned a new math game, heads up, that can be played with just a deck of cards. We started with an addition/ subtraction version of the game and we will try out the division/ multiplication version next week. We also continue to work on problem solving, using the strategies we have learned and developing our ability to explain our thinking. In Literacy we have been learning a new comprehension skill called summarizing. We have been practicing it with our class read aloud Wonder. Summarizing is being able to pick out key events and then re tell the important parts of the story. This is a great skill to practice at home with home reading, or even after watching a movie or a tv show. We also started writing in new writing journals. Each week we will work on a few journal prompts, focusing on including all the important parts of a paragraph (introduction, supporting sentences and conclusion), as well as adding descriptive words and checking for capitalization/ punctuation and spelling. Students are now using a rubric to help them gauge what they need to include to be meeting grade level expectations. We continue with handwriting, this week we worked on the letters L and M. Our Social Studies inquiry continues! This week we created landscape art inspired by Eric Carle's artwork. Each student chose a different landscape from the countries we are studying and recreated it using different painting techniques. REMINDER: Science projects are due on Monday. Student's need to bring their completed instrument with them to school on Monday along with their planning pages. We will begin presentation on Monday. Swimming will be April 9-12. If you have not already returned BOTH swim forms please do so next week. I hope everyone has a great weekend! Ms.Brett This felt like a busy week in room 74! We have two more weeks until Spring Break and we are trying to fit in as much as possible.
We finished our writing project on the 'Best Part of Me'. We will continue to work on expository writing for the next couple of weeks, focusing on including an introduction, supporting sentences and a conclusion in our writing. I have introduced a writing rubric to the class, so they can start to understand what basic, good and excellent writing look like. We know we need to include descriptive words, many supporting sentences and check our work to make sure we don't have very many mistakes. We continue to read 'Wonder' in class and we will start to do some more comprehension work with the book next week. Our Math focus continues to be on division. We are exploring the strategies we have learned and are working hard to figure out which strategies work best for each of us. This week we were talking about fact families and how we can use multiplication to help with division. Try one at home: write a fact family for 2 x5 In Social Studies we have been looking at the landforms and climate in our four countries. Next week we will begin an art project that ties in what we have learned about the different landscapes in each place. Gym and Music were combined this week for DrumFit. This will continue for next week. Next week we will be celebrating Pi Day on Wednesday by making apple pie together with some of the other grade 3 classes. If you are able to volunteer and haven't let me know, please do so! The more help the better :) Upcoming dates: March 14 Pi Day March 19 Swimming forms due Sound Projects due March 23 No school March 26-30 Spring Break April 2 No school April 9-12 Swimming I hope everyone has a great weekend! As we filled in our March calendar yesterday the class realized that Spring Break is only three weeks away! It's going to be a busy three weeks as we finish up some of the units we have been working on and projects we have on the go.
This week we continued looking at division, and specifically looked at what strategies we can use to help us solve division equations. A lot of our strategies are similar to what we used for multiplication, we just use them in a slightly different way for division. We started with equal groups, number line, and repeated subtraction. The big concept with division that students need to understand is that division is splitting up a number equally, and all of these strategies are based on that concept. Our focus in Literacy this week was on describing things without using the name of the actual thing. We looked at animals and the different nouns, adjectives and verbs that we can use to describe them. Each student wrote a riddle using their ideas and the rest of the class got to guess what each riddle was describing. We also started a special writing project that will focus on writing about ourselves. We continued to look at cursive writing, and are working on learning a new letter each day. For social studies we looked at the maps of each of the countries and where the different geographical regions are in each country. We also looked at the flags of each country. Next week we will look more at the landforms and climate in each country. Our Science unit is slowly wrapping up. This week we learned about how sound can change by being absorbed and amplified. Keep your eyes peeled for an at home project that will be coming home next week! Swimming Ability Form- please return to the school as soon as possible. Pi Day- See letter that came home today, as well as email for more information. I hope everyone is able to stay warm and safe this snowy weekend! Ms.Brett |
|