May 25th Update

I can't believe that we are entering our last week of May! This year has flown by!

I've fixed my technical issues with photos so this blog post is going to be focused on sharing some photos with you!

MOTHER'S DAY!

I didn't want to post these before Mother's Day because I didn't want to ruin the surprise. I just wanted to let you know how much time, practice, thought and love went into this project. We talked a lot about showing our love for someone by taking the time to do something special for that person. The card and bookmark/fridge magnet were simple gifts but the students did so much work leading up to the final products. We learned how to draw 8-10 different doodle flowers during two guided drawing sessions. The students then planned which flowers that they would draw for each part of their gift and they practiced them one more time on a practice card and practice strip of paper. Then the students did their good copies and painted/coloured them. For the inside of the card, the students used what they learned during our Friendship Simile Poem activity and created a unique one just for you! They were so proud of their gifts! I hope you enjoyed them! 

After becoming such masters at drawing and painting flowers, 

we decided to do a large watercolour piece! 

They turned out really well!

UNIVERSITY OF ALBERTA BOTANIC GARDEN FIELD TRIP

Click here to see all of our photos from the field trip!

CATERPILLARS

The students have been very excited watching their caterpillars grow! Little do most of them know...that on Saturday, our caterpillars' poop changed colour and several of them were in their J-Shapes! This is VERY EXCITING news if you are in 3C! Please show your child these photos! They are going to be super pumped to see this!

Click here to see all of our caterpillar pictures and the J Shape photos!

SCIENCE PARTNER WORK

In our recent Science unit focusing on Animal Life Cycles, we have been reading through passages of information and highlighting the important parts. During this process, we read through the passage a few times. When it was time to answer questions about the passage, we were very familiar with the information and if we needed to double check our thinking, we could rely on our highlighting to guide us. We have worked through this process a few times now with our Butterfly Life Cycle booklets and the students were getting more and more efficient with determining what was the most important information and highlighting it. For the last page, I had them partner up and complete the task together, without my guidance. The students enjoyed testing out their new skills in a more independent setting. 

BIKE SAFETY

The students enjoyed Day One of Bike Safety! Thank you to all of our parents for bringing bikes in and picking them up! We super appreciate your time and dedication to this!

Click here for more Bike Safety photos!

STUDENT OF THE WEEK

Congratulations goes out to our recent Student of the Weeks! We are super proud of you!

This week's important reminders:

Tuesday - Multiples Day - Dress like a twin or triplet with a friend or two!

Wednesday - our new library time

Thursday - Yearbook Order Deadline

Friday - Elder Florence Assembly

That's all for now! I need to switch over and spend a few hours on PowerSchool!

Have a great rest of your weekend!

May 20th Update

I hope that everyone is enjoying their long weekend! I apologize for the lack of blog post last weekend...my time and attention has been with my parents a lot lately. I hope all of our 3C moms enjoyed a wonderful Mother's Day!

LITERACY

We have continued to enjoy our start to the day reading Wonder! The students are growing so much as great readers during this time! We are having fantastic discussions, making predictions and connections to the story...they are all in! Reading conferences are also going really well. It amazes me every year at this time, when we look back at where we started...the growth is awesome!

In writing, we finished up our sentence starter introductions by learning how to write WHO sentences. Once students were confident with the six different types of sentences (what, when, how - LY, how - ING, where and who), we needed to practice switching between them. For a couple of days we did an activity called Roll A Sentence. Students roll a dice, the number on the dice refers to the type of sentence that needs to be written. Students were allowed to choose any noun to work with from our specific verb dictionary (mice, bears, orca/dolphin). Here's a sample of this activity:

After demonstrating that they were able to switch between sentence types, students were ready for our animal paragraph assignment. Students were asked to choose a photo from my favourite wildlife photographer's website. His name is Jason Leo Bantle. He's Canadian, originally from Saskatchewan, and has galleries in Banff, Canmore, Toronto, Niagara on the Lake and Saskatoon. After choosing a photo from his website gallery, they needed to do some planning. They had to come up with 5 ideas about what was happening in the photo (they had a worksheet with five numbered lines to fill in). They started with number three, which was what was happening in the actual photo in that second. Then, they had to work backwards in time...what happened just before he took the picture and then what happened right before that. Then they had to work forwards in time...what happened right after he took the photo and then right after that. All five things should take less than two minutes to happen. This planning part was quite challenging for some students because they wanted to tell this long detailed story and we had to rein them in. Once their plan was complete, we had them think of the types of specific verbs that they would need to use for their sentences. After verbs were written down, we were ready to write our paragraphs. We talked about how the planning part, the research, the thinking, the verb work, takes more time than the actual writing part but it makes the writing part so much easier! Students were told that they couldn't repeat sentence starters and had to plan ahead when it came to sentence starters. If they wanted to use an exciting when starter for their third sentence that contained the main action, that meant they couldn't use it anywhere else. They had a checklist to keep track of their sentence starters. Once they were finished writing their sentences, they were able to type their paragraphs into a google doc, under the photo that they picked. They were all so proud of the finished product! 

Click here to see your child's animal paragraph!

(I tried to rename each document to include the childs' name, but it won't let me. I'm sorry but you'll have get your child to pick their paragraph from the picture.)

NUMERACY

We finished up our Multiplication and Division unit. Marks from the unit test have been entered on PowerSchool. I will send home the tests this week so you can see more specifically where your child may need a little more support. 

We started our unit of Measurement by brainstorming everything that we know about measurement. 

We are starting the unit by focusing on linear measurement. Grade Three is an exciting year in math because students get to explore standard units instead of measuring items with paperclips! We have started to look at centimetres and will be looking at metres this week.

I'm sorry, but I have to cut this short. I am having so many technical issues with uploading photos today and I've got to head out to the lake to help my parents with some yard work at the cabin. 

Reminders...

May 17 - 20 - NO SCHOOL FOR STUDENTS

May 21 - Grade 3s to UofA Botanic Gardens - PERMISSION FORM REQUIRED

May 21 - Track practices start and are at lunch recesses

May 23 - Bike Day - Bring your bike to school.

May 24 - Volunteer Appreciation Drive Thru

May 25 - Timbits Soccer Tournament

May 30 - Yearbook Order Deadline

June 5 - Early Dismissal

June 6 - Grade 3 Ukrainian Village

June 7 - BGRS Track Meet

May 5th Update

We had another fantastic week in 3C!

LITERACY

The students continue to love reading Wonder! The students have enjoyed hearing the story from the perspective of Summer and Jack. We have had so many great discussions, made some personal connections to the story and made several thoughtful predictions. 

In writing, we:

• reviewed how-ly sentences
• learned how to write how-ing and where sentences
• investigated a few sentences and worked together to ensure that they were complete, well written sentences

NUMERACY

This past week in Math, we focused on:

• determining whether to use division or multiplication in a problem solving context
• using arrays as a visual support, generating two multiplication and two division sentences

Next week, we will be finishing up our unit on multiplication and division!

SOCIAL STUDIES

This past week in Social Studies, we focused on:

• the geographical features of Ukraine
• the location of the major cities, rivers, mountains, bodies of water
• life in Ukraine, in the city versus the country

EDUCATION WEEK

We really enjoyed the activities that were planned for us by the Education Week committee! They did a fantastic job!

Pancake Breakfast!

Hats on for Mental Health

Guest Reader from the Lion's Club

Collaborative Art

Shared Reading

Collaborative Story Writing

REMINDERS