Learning Is Fun In 3C!

Last week was another fantastic week in 3C!

The students are super excited about a partner project that they are working on in Social Studies! Instead of me teaching the students about a few of the big celebrations or festivals in India, I decided that it was their turn to be the teachers! Students were partnered up and chose one of eight celebrations to research. As a group, we came up with the questions that we need answered to give us the most information about each special celebration. Armed with a research question list, students set off to find the answers online! They quickly learned the key meaning of the prefix re- in the word research! The information wasn't always easy to find...they had to search over and over again! On Friday, we switched gears and started preparing their slideshow presentations that they will present to the class! This isn't new to them because we've been working on our monthly slideshows all year. Although, they were pretty excited when I showed them how to insert video clips into their presentations. We will continue to work on the presentations this week. If all goes well, I'd like to have the students be prepared to present their celebration to the class the following week (Teacher's Convention week). They are all pretty excited to teach me a thing or two!

Other things going on this week:

NUMERACY

We have finished our lessons on triple digit subtraction and will regularly practice these calculations along with addition to encourage consistent accuracy. 

This week we are moving on to some mental math strategies!

LITERACY

This week we are going to dive deeper into the JoAnne Moore writing program starting with her sentence structure unit. Students will be focusing on writing sentences using varied sentence starters and specific verbs that show the reader what's happening instead of telling them. 

For example, instead of saying:

The dog went across the road. 

Students will write:

In a flash, the dog darted across the road!

This focus on writing truly transforms their writing!

During read alouds for the next while we will be reading one of my favourite books, Frindle. 

IMPORTANT REMINDERS

Wednesday - Beach Day

Thursday - report cards come home 

Friday - no school (PD Day)

Phew!

The last two weeks have flown by! We have been super busy in 3C!

I'd like to start this blog post with a GIGANTIC THANK YOU from the students and I for all of the parent support this week for skating! We always had help tying skates and at least one parent on the ice! This week's skating was only possible because of you! We are truly blessed to have such supportive families in 3C!

LITERACY

It was great to get back into Words Their Way and Word Wall Words during the first week in January! We had to take last week off due to skating. Every day we go skating, we lose approximately one hour of instructional time. This time has to come from somewhere and one of the easiest places to steal from is WTW and WWW because the lessons are new each week. We are back on track this week with WTW and WWW!

Reading conferences were jam packed the past two weeks. I'm trying to touch base with everyone in these first few weeks back! We also completed the Star Reading Assessment this past week to monitor student growth.

Before the break we started a directed paragraph using JoAnne Moore sentence starters focusing on life in a snowglobe. We continued this piece during our first week back and will be "publishing" our work in a special way! Stay tuned! We will be now diving deeper into sentence structure JoAnne Moore style! I can't wait to witness the change in the students' writing!

NUMERACY

Over the past two weeks, we have been working on addition with and without regrouping using 2 and 3 digit numbers and subtraction with and without regrouping using 2 digit numbers. They students have been doing a fantastic job! This week we are going to focus on subtraction with and without regrouping using 3 digit numbers. We will commit sometime to practice to ensure consistent accuracy with our calculations.

SOCIAL STUDIES

As soon as we came back to school after the break, we began our study of basic needs and quality of life. After a couple of days getting a grasp of these two concepts we continued onto our study of India. India is the first of four countries that we are going to study this year. We have looked into how people in India meet their basic needs. Where do they live? What are their homes like? What types of clothes do they wear? What are the characteristics of their culture? What languages do they speak? What traditions do they have? What are their marriages and weddings like? What do the children like to do for fun? How are their lives the same as ours? How are they different?

On Friday, we celebrated India Day! All of the students had such a fantastic time! A huge thank you goes out to my friend, Sreeja, for bringing in a variety of traditional Indian clothes, sharing family photos of her time in Kerala with my students and spending the afternoon with us doing beautiful henna designs on the students! Another huge thank you goes out to Mrs. Watt and Mrs. Wagner for spending the afternoon doing henna designs on the students for me and to Mrs. Campbell for being our Indian fashion designer and photographer! The students are going to treasure those photos and their beautiful henna designs! And last but not least, to my grade three teaching teammates, Mrs. Rothfos, Mrs. Tewitz, Mrs. Forchuk and Mrs. Towne, thank you for all of your hard work behind the scenes to make this amazing afternoon possible for our grade threes!

We will continue our study of India for the next week and a bit and then we will switch gears and dive into our next unit in Science!