March 17th & 22nd Updates

LITERACY

Read Aloud - This week we started Wonder by R.J. Palacio! Ask your child what they think about the characters that they have met: August, Julian, Jack Will, Charlotte, Summer and Mr. Tushman.

Writing - Our word choice work this week had us focusing on adjectives! The students enjoyed the final week on working with adjectives. Their final task was to create an insect, draw and label it, and then brainstorm adjectives to describe it. We had some pretty terrifying creatures come to life in 3C!

Word Work - This week we focused in on long vowel sounds using the silent e rule. The students really enjoyed the challenge words at the end of the unit! They are getting much better at completing the challenges independently! We are also working on chunking the sounds when breaking down words to spell them or read them. Instead of sounding out translate like this: t-r-a-n-s-l-a (long)-t, I would like to see them chunk it like this: tr-ans-late.

 NUMERACY

This week, we continued to work on using a picture to come up with a repeated addition sentence and a multiplication sentence. We also started looking at how to come up with the answer to a multiplication question without using repeated addition or a picture. We looked at all of the facts that we need to learn in Grade Three and came up with strategies/tricks for quickly getting the answer. 

There are only 3 multiplication facts that are not covered by our tricks...and I have a trick for them too! I know it sounds crazy and for us adults, it seems easier to just memorize the facts, but there is a program called Multiplication in a Flash that works wonders! This program uses words that sub in for numbers, visuals and crazy stories to help students remember the facts.

To hear the story for 3x3, click here!

To hear the story for 3x4, click here!

I have introduced these two stories to the kids and will introduce the final story for 4x4 when we get back from Spring Break.

SCIENCE

We finished up our science unit with a bridge building project! I was super impressed with the effort that went into the bridges! The students were so proud of them! 

Click here to see all of our bridge photos!

SOCIAL STUDIES

The students have really enjoyed learning about Tunisia this week! Some of the highlights included:

• the 3 geographical regions 
• the European influence due to the proximity (right on the Mediterranean Sea)
• the variety of houses depending on geographical region
• troglodyte houses in Matmata
• getting water in the desert
• the use of the coast line for import and export
• agriculture: olives, olive oil, pomegranates, citrus fruit, grain, sugar beets, dates, almonds
• national dish: couscous
• Ancient city of Carthage 
• art: mosaics, weaving
• health care is provided to all citizens

The students also really enjoyed celebrating Tunisia Day! They played Mancala, worked on a weaving project and a mosaic project and enjoyed some Tunisian food (dates, couscous, flat bread with olive oil and baklava)! Thank you to Sophia's mom and Maklin's mom for helping us out with the stations! 

Click here to see all of our Tunisia Day photos!

PHYSICAL EDUCATION

We have been super fortunate to have a few special guests in over the past few weeks! We had a fantastic Lacrosse class with Eric! He was amazing with the students!

Click here for more Lacrosse photos!

We traded our Lacrosse sticks for our dance shoes and had a blast participating with Leo in the Raga Revolution program!

Click here for more Raga Revolution photos!

STUDENT LED CONFERENCES

Thank you to all of the families that came out to our Student Led Conferences! It was so great to see how excited the students were to show off their learning and accomplishments with you! I'm sorry if I missed getting a picture of you and your child...it was pretty busy at one point and I didn't get a chance to run around with my camera. 

March 10th Update

LITERACY

It was a big week in 3C! It was a rollercoaster of emotions this week as we finished up the final chapters of Elephant Secret! There was fear, sadness, grief, disbelief, shock, worry, relief and pure joy! For most of the students, it was the first time that a book has made them cry. It amazing to watch children at this age transform as readers! Going from reading to learn to read, to reading for enjoyment, fulfillment, escape, excitement and fun! It was such a pleasure sharing this book with them! We are all pretty attached to elephants and woolly mammoths right now, so we enjoyed a little character drawing of our favourite baby mammoth, Woolly!

We also spent quite a bit of time working with words this week! We studied:

• r controlled vowels
• y as a vowel
• breaking words into syllables (each syllable has a vowel sound)
• adding endings to verbs that end in an e (drop the e before adding -ing)

NUMERACY

This week we focused on skip counting and how it relates to multiplication. We worked on strategies and tricks for counting by: 2s, 3s, 4s, 5s, and 10s. We also practiced writing the repeated addition sentence and multiplication sentence that go with a picture of equal groups.

TECHNOLOGY PROJECT

I introduced the students to a long term technology project this week. They are creating a month by month slideshow/scrapbook of their year in Grade Three. There are so many skills that they need to practice to be successful with this project. 

We worked on:

• adding shared photos to their own drive
• moving those photos into a specific folder within their drive
• changing the background of all of the slides in a slideshow at once
• changing the font in a text box
• changing the fill colour in a text box
• browsing photos in their drive
• inserting photos from within Google Slides
• arranging photos on the slide
• cropping photos
• inserting text boxes
• creating titles
• sharing details of a moment in a text box

We will continue to work on this project until the end of the year!

STUDENT OF THE WEEK

This week we celebrated Becca as our Student of the Week! Mrs. Kloschinsky finished reading her certificate and then added her own proclamation. She declared that Becca is an RBES KINDNESS QUEEN! She spoke about how Becca stands out among our student population for being super sweet and kind to everyone she interacts with! We are so proud to have Becca in 3C!

RBES Kindness Queen

IMPORTANT REMINDERS

• Mar 12 - Bridge Project Due
• Mar 13 - Student Led Conferences
• Mar 14 - 20 - Raga Revolution
• Mar 22 - PD Day No School
• Mar 23 - April 1 SPRING BREAK

March 3rd Update

LITERACY

We've started a new topic for our writing mini lessons, WORD CHOICE! This topic is always an exciting one because with just a little bit of extra thought, student writing is transformed. This week we really focused on the use of specific verbs and how by choosing the perfect verb we communicate so much to our reader. 

For example, in the sentence,

 The car went around the track. 

the reader has no idea what's going on at the track. 

Is there a race? Is the car winning or losing the race? 

If we just change the verb, we can transform the picture in the mind of the reader. 

The car raced around the track.

Compared to, 

The car sputtered around the track.

Changing the verb that we use is so effective and so much more fun!

We also looked at the use of adverbs to help paint a clear picture for our readers.

NUMERACY

This week we finished up with rounding and estimating sums and differences and moved into multiplication! The students were very excited to start exploring the connection between repeated addition and multiplication. 

 

For this picture, if you were trying to figure out how many marbles are in each bag, you could:

ADD 3+3+3+3

or you could 

MULTIPLY 4 x 3

When students write the multiplication sign I get them to say, groups of.

We also started practicing our skip counting by 2s, 3s, 5s and 10s. We will also start working on skip counting by 4s.

SCIENCE

The students thoroughly enjoyed their time with Mr. Caron building bridges! Mr. Caron is a curriculum superstar! He covers so many of our curricular objectives in his 90 minute workshop! On Friday, the students worked on a slideshow reflecting on their time building bridges and all of the things that they learned!

To see more Building Bridges photos, click here!

To view a student's slideshow, click on this link!

PINK SHIRT DAY

We were so busy on Pink Shirt Day that I didn't get a single photo of us in our shirts! I couldn't believe it when the bell rang and it hit me, I didn't take a picture! UGH!

Just like Orange Shirt Day, if I'm asking students to wear a pink shirt, we are going to dedicate some time to the subject. I prepared a presentation for the students that contained some interesting facts, great videos and fantastic conversation starters. 

I shared my family's personal struggle with bullying with my oldest son, Elliot. The students already knew that we were dealing with some issues because I was away last Tuesday because my husband and I had to take personal days off of work to go to Riverview to deal with a bullying situation. Using a real life example and talking about it openly, hopefully made our discussions more meaningful. I'm a strong believer in the fact that there have to be positive outcomes from negative situations. 

We focused on defining bullying. Sometimes the word bullying is overused, calling any type of rude interaction between students as bullying. We defined bullying as having three specific characteristics:

1. targeted (only happening to you or a small group of people)
2. hurtful (either physically or emotionally)
3. repetitive (it keeps happening even after you've asked them to stop/someone has told them to stop)

Some of the facts that hit the students the hardest were:

• 75/100 people say that they have been affected by bullying
• Bullying can cause serious harm:
• Children who are bullied can suffer from headaches, depression and anxiety.
• Children who are bullied and who bully others have an increased rate of suicide.
• Children who bully are more likely to be involved with criminal activity.
• 6 out of 10 boys that bully others in school have a criminal record by the time they are 24 years old.

We also talked about what we can to stop bullying. We discussed a variety of options to ensure that everyone could find one strategy that felt comfortable to them. We did some role playing in small groups to practice our new skills. 

At the end of the day, the students designed their own Pink Shirt Day shirts with some of their new slogans and ideas in how to stop bullying. It was such a fantastic day!

If you are interested in further exploring this topic, I encourage you to look at the videos put out by Brooks Gibbs. His approach to bullying was recommended to us by a psychologist and it did prove to be quite empowering for our son.

IMPORTANT REMINDERS

• Mar 5 - BOKS Starts again 
• Mar 9 - RBES Girls Floor Hockey Tournament 
• Mar 13 - Student Led Conferences
• Mar 14 - 20 - Raga Revolution
• Mar 22 - PD Day No School
• Mar 23 - April 1 SPRING BREAK