A great start to a new school year...

We had a busy week together, learning the new routines of Grade 3 and getting to know our classmates better! 

In Language Art this week, the students completed a few spelling assessments! They were all very focused and tried their best!

The students also completed their first Star Reading Test on the chrome books. They have been assigned letters for their Read to Self reading bags. Please let us know if you'd like books sent home at your child's level for Home Reading. 

Our planes are complete and ready to fly from our home base of the Amazing Race. We are so pleased with how many students have been diligently reading and recording home reading minutes every night. Please help your child be successful by encouraging 20-30 minutes of reading each night. If you need reading material at your child level, please send a note in their agenda and we will gladly gather some books together for you. 

We started the week off with their first Journal entry. We have a scribbler for each student and they will be writing in it weekly. Usually this is an open ended assignment and we allow the students to write whatever is on their mind. The students often decide to write about their weekends. 

We introduced the class to a Making Words activity, which we will play on a regular basis. The students are given letter tiles and asked to make 2,3,4,5 and 6 letter words. The letters they are given also spell a "mystery word"! The students work individually, in pairs and then we work together as a class, sharing the words we made. The students enjoyed this activity and were excited to figure out the special word. This week our mystery words were TEACHER and CLASSROOM. 

We also started reading from the Grade 3 Collections Series. This is a book made up of short fiction and non-fiction stories. We read these stories aloud as a class. Students who are confident with their reading have started volunteering to read to the class while we follow along. We will eventually encourage everyone to read aloud small paragraphs in order to work on fluency, expression and build confidence. 

In Math, we started Mad Minutes. The students have two minutes to complete 30 questions. We will do this daily throughout the school year. We have started with addition and will move onto subtraction, multiplication and division.

 

We also started our first unit called "Patterns and Relations". We kicked off the unit reading the story "Ready or Not, Here I Come". This week, students started to demonstrate an understanding of creating and describing increasing patterns. We used square tiles to show how to build increasing patterns by adding two, three of four tiles to a letter. 

Then we worked through a couple pages of math to practice. 

In Social, we started our mapping unit. We will learn about how to read maps in order to understand where in the world we are in relation to the countries we will be studying throughout the year. This week, we talked about the directions on a compass. We then used this knowledge to read a Pirate's Map. 

In Gym this week, we worked on cross country running and cooperative games. We share our gym class with 3A. 

Ask your child to explain the "cowboy" "hot dog" and "pizza" tag game. 

Everyday we will incorporate 15 minutes of Healthy Hearts. This may happen at a different time each day depending on the schedule of our other classroom activities. 

For Art this week, we began a project that will be continued next week. We used the colours of the rainbow to create a background that we will add to. The students worked slow and carefully to paint within their lines. They turned out fabulous!