It seems like maybe, just maybe, spring has finally arrived. The warmer weather meant we were able to get outside, not just for breaks, but for Science too! It is so nice to see how much everyone enjoys learning outdoors. We went outside for Science twice this week, both times to try some building challenges. On Tuesday we joined Ms.Patton's class for a snow themed building challenge. Students had to build snowballs of different sizes and used rulers to measure and make sure they achieved the exact measurements required. They also had to build snowmen of different heights, finishing with the tallest snowman they could build! We also completed our egg drop challenge outside. After designing and building a structure to keep an egg safe on Monday , we tested out structures on Thursday. There was a good mix of structures that worked well or not at all, and everything in between. We will be continuing to learn about the design process and how that can be used when we are building next week.
We finally finished our Social/Art project this week. Students added their final layer of wax and painted the top layer onto their pysanky art and then we used an iron to lift off the wax layers, leaving behind beautiful designs! This process mimicked the process that is used when creating real Ukrainian pysanky eggs. We also started looking at a famous Peruvian site- Machu Picchu. We will continue learning about the lost city of the Inca people in the next couple of weeks. Literacy this week was mainly focused around starting our literature circles. As a class we are all reading Fantastic Mr.Fox by Roald Dahl for our first round of literature circles. Before reading each chapter students make predictions and during reading they record any words they find that are either new or good descriptive words. After each chapter, each student is responsible for completing comprehension activities. These include summarizing, illustrating, making connections, and asking questions. In addition to literature circles we continue to work on writing through our journal writing, I hope many of you were able to take a look at our writing rubric during student led conferences to see what we are working towards with out writing in grade 3. In Math we continued to look at subtraction with regrouping this week. We practiced a lot, and even tried out some word problems using our stacked strategy to solve them. It has been great to see how much everyone is growing in their ability and confidence with this strategy. This strategy becomes easier with practice and the more students practice, the more easily they will remember the correct steps for solving equations. Next week we will start on addition! It was great to see everyone this week, thank you to everyone who came and visited our classroom and were able to see what we have been working on. Also, thank you so much to everyone for their flexibility and understanding with the saga of the music center forms! I think we are all sorted out finally! I hope everyone enjoys the sunshine this weekend! Ms.Brett It was awesome to see all of the great swimmers we have in room 74! Thank you to parents for helping to make this week of swimming a success. We had great volunteers at the pool everyday, and all of the behind the scenes organization happening at home every night to ensure everyone came with a dry towel and bathing suit everyday was very much appreciated. Swimming was a very major part of our week, but we did manage to squeeze in some academic work! In Math we jumped into subtracting with regrouping. This is trickier, but it has been great to see the determination and perseverance as we continue to practice this skill. We will continue to practice this next week, before moving on to addition. Here are some to try: We combined Social Studies and Art this week to continue our pysanky project. Students have been very patient with the slow process of applying wax and adding layers of paint. If all goes as planned we will have our final product on display next week for conferences.
We were able to do some writing and reading this week as well. We did not get to our spelling tests, so we will get caught up at the beginning of next week. Next week is student led conferences. Please bring your child with you so that they can show you some of the different activities we do in class. There will be stations/ activities for you to do together. One of the stations will be a time to see me, at a pre booked time. Enjoy a sunny weekend! Ms.Brett Dear parents and guardians,
Given the tragedy in Humboldt, Saskatchewan this past weekend, we will be remembering the victims and survivors by participating in Jersey Day on April 12th. Students are encouraged to wear their jersey. They may wear a jersey of any kind. If your child does not have a jersey but would still like to participate, they are encouraged to wear green or yellow. All schools in the CBE will be flying flags at half-mast to remember until Thursday. Our hearts go out to all of the families impacted by this tragedy. I hope everyone had a great Spring Break! It was awesome to hear about all the adventures that so many of you went on over the break. The weather in Calgary seems to be confused about what time of year it is, but we are moving right along inside! We started lots of new things this week and even though it's took us a few days to remember what classroom expectations are, we seem to be back on track! We jumped into a new science unit this week with a building challenge. Students were put into pairs and received 10 marshmallows and 30 pieces of spaghetti. Their challenge was to try to build the tallest structure they could. It was hard, but it was a great way to start thinking about building materials and structures. Over the next month or so we will be testing different materials, determining what different materials are good for, the design process and all about different structures. It should be a fun unit with lots of hands on experiments and many more building challenges to come! Here are some pictures of our first challenge: We have also started learning a new strategy in math. The Stacked Strategy (or the traditional algorithm) is what many of us grew up learning and for many is the only strategy we ever learned! We have started with subtraction and are beginning with the basics. This week we worked on problems that do not require regrouping (or borrowing and carrying as we learned it) and next week we will start to learn how to regroup. Some of the rules we have learned so far for subtraction: - The bigger number has to be on top - ALWAYS start with the ones place (on the right) - Move to the tens next, and then to the hundreds I know many students are somewhat familiar with this strategy, but we are going to work through it slowly to ensure everyone has a solid understanding of how to use the strategy properly and effectively. Here are some you can try at home: We also jumped back into our literacy routine this week, working on our journal writing, getting new spelling words and practicing our reading. In Social Studies we are taking a closer look at Ukrainian traditions. Since Easter is a very important celebration in the Ukraine, we looked at the Easter tradition of Pysankys this week. Pysankys are decorated easter eggs that are made in the Ukraine. We learned about how to make them, the symbols on them and what the different colors represent. We are starting an art project based on this traditional Ukrainian tradition.
Music: Artist of the Week: Elton JohnThis week we will be focusing on the pop rock icon who used his phenomenal piano skills to revolutionize the “rock ballad”. Important Information: Next week is swimming! We are swimming Monday-Thursday. Please send your child with their swim gear (bathing suit & towel) in a separate bag every day. Book orders are coming home today, they are due back on Friday, April 13. Parent Teacher Interviews are April 19(evening) & 20 (morning). These will be student led interviews so students must attend with parents. Students will have things to show you at your leisure and then you will be able to meet with me at a specific time to discuss academic progress. Please note these meetings will be in the classroom at the same time as other families are in the room. If there is something that you would like to discuss privately please let me know and we will arrange an alternative time to meet. I hope everyone has a great weekend! Ms.Brett 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 I can't believe this was our last full week of February. This week we celebrated the 100th day of school. To warm our brains up we tried dividing 100 cubes as many ways as we could. It was a challenge, but it was interesting to see all the different strategies and ideas everyone came up with. For literacy we travelled into the future and imagined what our lives and the world will be like in 100 years. To help them imagine, I used an aging app to show them what they might look like in 100 years. Everyone got a good kick out for it! Then they wrote about what they imagine 2118 will be like and I thoroughly enjoyed reading all of their ideas. In the afternoon we travelled back in time 100 years and looked at picture of Calgary from 100 years ago. We also took a look at a grocery store flyer from 1920 and imagined we were grocery shopping with only 100 cents (or $1). For math students had to calculate how much they could buy with 100 cents. To their surprise, they could buy ingredients for an entire meal! We continued to explore the concept of division this week in math and we will begin to look at the strategies that we can use to solve division equations. We also tried out some logic puzzles this week. They were tricky but really got our brains thinking. Here's an example that you can try at home: Thank you to everyone who came to Math Night last night, it was great to be able to share more of what we do every day to teach math!
We are continuing to explore Peru, Tunisia, India and the Ukraine. This week we looked at where each country is in the world and began working on mapping the location of each country. This week students received new spelling words and were able to practice them during literacy centers. They will work with these words for one more week before being tested. We continue to focus on writing in literacy, looking at how we can add more description and write more interesting sentences. We also started hand writing this week. Each day we will learn a new letter in cursive, and slowly start to practice how we join the letters together. Students will not be expected to use handwrite during class activities, as we are aiming to introduce them to the concept. SWIMMING: Our class will be participating in swimming lessons this year. We now have confirmed the dates and times for each class. Our class will be swimming APRIL 9-13. Our lesson will be from 10-10:45 and students will be transported by bus from the school. We are looking for parent volunteers who can help with this field trip. Volunteers would need to be available from approximately 9-12. This time frame includes the time it will take to bus there and back, but it is yet to be determined if parents will ride to bus with classes or meet us there. We are especially interested in having some male volunteers to help in the boys change room. All volunteers will need a current police clearance to help with the field trip. Please let me know if you are able to volunteer! Music: Next week students will explore a specific genre of music: Disco! In the week leading up to our “Drum Fit” unit, we will be focusing on one of the most infamous dance genres. Whether you like it or not, Disco had a major influence on dance. Pulling from the genres of motown and funk, disco was a marginalized genre in the early 70s that eventually exploded into the mainstream. Movie Night- The Parent Council is hosting a Movie Night next week on March 1. Tickets are still available and can be ordered online. Pink Shirt Day: next week on Wednesday we will celebrate pink shirt day. This day recognizes the important of kindness. Students are encouraged to wear pink! Upcoming Important Dates: February 28 Pink Shirt Day & Fun Lunch March 1 Movie Night March 7 Fun Lunch March 9 Club Friday March 21 Fun Lunch March 23 No School- PD Day March 26-30 No School- Spring Break April 2 No School - Easter Have a great weekend! Ms.Brett What a sweet end to our short week! My heart felt very filled this afternoon watching all of the kindness and friendship in our classroom during our board game time. Thank you to everyone who sent in treats, cards and games, the laughter and smiles made the enjoyment evident.
The past few days we have focused a lot on writing. We worked with a writing prompt on Monday and on Tuesday we started to think about details and what that means. We read a book together, and then drew a picture of a house as a class. It was interesting to see how much detail we could add to one house, and how it transformed from just a box, to something special and unique. Next week we can going to practice transferring that skill to our writing. We have also made a new rule in our classroom: No one is allowed to start a sentence with the word and. We also talked about how we make our writing more interesting by starting our sentences differently. I hope that you are able to see a difference in our TWAS writing. I introduced the word DIVISION to the class in Math this week, and we are going to begin exploring what division is and how it works together with multiplication in the weeks to come. I will continue to post about the strategies and vocabulary we are using in our classroom. Our class also started a new novel this week. We will be reading Wonder as a class for the next couple of months. This beautiful story will tie into our social studies topic of quality of life, as well our health and life skills curriculum. Thank you to our wonderful gym teachers (and the weather for cooperating) for organizing an awesome winter sports day. We are keeping up with the Winter Olympics in our classroom, and this afternoon was a great compliment to everything the students are working on in gym class. A big thanks to the parent council for providing hot chocolate as well! A message from Ms.Thomas: This week’s artist of the week is iconic for the legacy she left on Canadiana music with her blended folk/rock/jazz/pop style. Joni Mitchell got her start in the early 60s by working her way through Western Canada as a busker and playing in a variety of local venues. Have a wonderful long weekend! See you on Tuesday. Ms.Brett |
|