We got right down to business this week and we accomplished so much!
LITERACY
In writing, we continued our focus on the trait of ORGANIZATION. This week, we focused on contrasting and comparing two things in our writing. How are they the same? How are they different? We learned that we need to organize our writing so that we don't confuse the reader about similarities and differences. The convention that we focused on was underlining our book titles when we write. This week coming up we will finish our last week focusing on organization before heading on to study word choice. The students also enjoyed telling me all about their Christmas break in their journals this week.
In reading, we started a new chapter book called Frindle by Andrew Clements. The students have enjoyed getting to know the main characters Nick and Ms. Granger. Ask your child to tell you what's happened so far! It's such a fantastic book!
Read to self has continued to go well. I enjoy the time that it provides me to conference with students about their independent reading strategies! There has been an amazing amount of growth in reading abilities over the past four months! It's one of my favourite things to witness in the classroom!
Our Working with Words block is critical to pushing students in their understanding of how words work. It is extremely important that the skills and lessons learned during this time start transferring to the areas of reading and writing. Seeing the relationship between words, finding small words within larger words, recognizing common endings (suffixes) and beginnings (prefixes), catching rhyming word patterns, understanding the difference between short and long vowel spelling patterns all lead to greater fluency in reading and writing.
NUMERACY
After completing a quick review of the first ten lessons in our place value unit, we continued on to new material. This week, we have been focusing on trading. This lesson is leading students into addition with trading. It's important that students understand that you cannot have a double digit number in a single place value spot. For example:
You can't have 16 ones in the ones place...if a student was the write down the number like they typically do from the place value chart they would come up with the number 2416. They need to recognize that there are ten too many ones in the ones place, bundle them up and move them forward to the tens place. This concept is extremely important to understand before we proceed into multi-digit addition.
The students were also brushing up on their basic facts this week in preparation for the addition lessons coming up! We played a couple of quick games using a ten sided dice. First, we played Double It. Students rolled the dice and quickly doubled the number on the die. Then, we switched to Make Ten. Students rolled the dice and quickly said the number that would make ten with the number on the die. These are both quick and easy ways to practice our math facts. We also completed a page of All The Facts You Need to Know to help improve our quick recall of our basic addition facts.
SOCIAL STUDIES
The students really enjoyed diving into our new Social Studies unit this week! We started out by talking about basic needs, wants and quality of life. We talked about how basic needs are the things that you cannot live without: food, clothing, shelter and love. We also talked about wants and the students could easily tell the difference between needs and wants. Then, we discussed the concept of quality of life.
Quality of life is the sense of safety, comfort, security, health and happiness that people have in their lives.
We talked about how we achieve a good quality of life in Canada and we compared it to the situation in other countries (ex; access to health care here versus the USA). The students were very thoughtful in their discussions about how lucky we are to live where we do and with the amazing families that we have. We talked about how we are going to compare and contrast the way people achieve a good quality of life in India, Peru, Tunisia and Ukraine for the remainder of the year. We are going to start our study in India.
The next lesson focused on finding shelter in India. The students were amazed by how life is different in India. We looked at houses in the city versus houses in the country. We studied life in Mumbai specifically. The students were very curious and interested in how twenty-one million people find shelter within one city. During our discussions we focused on being respectful in our observations. An important focus of the Grade Three Social Studies curriculum is becoming a respectful global citizen...being a person who appreciates our similarities and differences with people from other countries and doesn't see things that we have or do as the right way. We also discussed how in India, the different states or regions are very unique in several ways. The students are excited to continue to learn about India!
PHYSICAL EDUCATION
In PE, we have been focusing on our Gymnastics unit. Students have been learning a variety of ways to move their bodies (skip, gallop, bear walk, crab walk, etc.). Mr. Van Huis taught the students the proper way to do a forward roll. We also learned how to do a front and side scale. Students also participated in a fitness relay where they ran across the gym and either did 5 sit ups, 5 push ups or 5 burpees before heading back to their team to tag the next runner. It was a great week in the gym!
Skating is coming up! Please make sure that you read the emails in regards to skating and fill out the permission slip online. Thank you!
STAR STUDENT
We really enjoyed getting to know Miss S better this week! She brought in the most precious five special things! We also enjoyed when her mom came in to read us her letter and when she brought in their two dogs!
STUDENT OF THE WEEK
Congratulations to Mr R for earning Student of the Week this week! Way to go!
That's all for now! Have a great week!
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