Devon Christmas Elves

This week we spent a lot of time talking about Global Citizenship. We talked about what it means to help out other people in our community and around the world. In our Social Studies text books, we read about organizations such as the Red Cross, Unicef, and the World Wildlife Fund. The students were also introduced to the Devon Christmas Elves organization, which our school has been helping for years. Our Grade 3 students will be collecting the donations this year and then in December we will be presenting them to the Christmas Elves, as well as delivering and sorting the collection over at the depot. We started the campaign this week by decorating donation boxes and creating posters on the chrome books to hang around the school. We even had two brave girls who presented our project to the entire school! We hope to see donations start coming in next week.

In Language Arts, the students had the opportunity to share the sentences they have been working on. The focus of this assignment was to make more complex, descriptive sentences. They wrote about monkeys, dragons and then a castle.

We completed a Making Words activity. The students were given the following letters... i,b,d,t,a,h,y and r! They worked on their own to form 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 letter words. Then they paired up to share words and try to come up with more words to fill their list. Finally, we worked together as a class to compile a final list and share the mystery word. This week it was BIRTHDAY!

We also read from our Collections Series. This week we read The Princess and the Pea and Mr. Frog Went A-Courtin'. Mr. Frog is like a readers theater, where the students are given a character and they need to read and act out the lines. We did this one a couple times, changing roles. The students loved this activity!

In Math, we continued working with number lines. The students were also ordering numbers from least to greatest and greatest to least. Then we learned a new card game. The students used their knowledge of place value and ordering numbers to collect as many chips as they could by making the greatest number.

We continue with our Mad Minutes and are now completing subtraction. These questions will slowly increase with difficulty. Your child will either be challenging themselves by aiming for a higher mark or if they are receiving 30/30, then they have been challenging themselves with a faster time.

This week, we flew to India. We are staying with our friend Ravi and his family. As we read through the textbook, the students are filling out a travel journal about the experience and culture there. This week, we learned about the quality of life and traditions. The students learned about some new foods (chipati and curry) and some popular festivals (Diwali and Holi).

In Art this week, we worked on our Christmas decorations for the gym. Each class is working on a special project to spruce up the gym for Christmas concert night. Since our students are experts at oil pastels, we decided this would be a good project for them. We did a directed drawing of a reindeer and the students used oil pastels to add colour. Next week, we will add some sparkle! :)

Way to go! Here are the frequent flyers for this week!

Congratulations to our new Student of the Week!

Secret Juice...

This week, in Language Arts, the kids created their own Secret Juice as a project to conclude our Freckle Juice novel study. We discussed words used for measurement and then the students came up with six ingredients for their own creation. Then we talked about different verbs to use in the directions and the students worked on making well written sentences to describe in detail how to make their secret juice. The students also had the opportunity to work in groups and google recipes on the ipads to look at the format and see various direction wording. They complied a list of "recipe words" and those were added to the list.

We also started reading the second book of the Collections series together. This book is comprised of short fairy tale stories. This week we read, "The Enchanted Pitcher".

The students also continued working on creating more complex sentences, using a step-by-step assignment to guide them.

In Math, we continued working on making numbers using base ten blocks. We also compared numbers using greater than, less than and ordered numbers from greatest to least. The students learned about number lines and how to use them to order numbers.

 

This week, we prepared the class for our trip to India. First, we made passports and explained the importance of them. The students added all of the important information and even had a "grumpy" photograph taken, which most of them found very hard to pose for! :)

As a class, we brainstormed a list of questions that we would need to know before travelling over to India. For example, "What is the weather like?" "What kind of food do they eat" "How much does a loaf of bread cost" What kind of clothing to they wear?". The students used their Chrome books to research the answers. At the end of the week, they shared with the class what they found out in their research.

We started a new unit in Phys. Ed. The students are learning basketball skills for the next couple of weeks. This week we worked on proper dribbling techniques. The students enjoyed a game called "Musical Hoops" to practice their dribbling skills.

We learned that the national tree of India is the banyan tree. We looked at different photos of this tree and then drew pictures and painted them black. To add colour, we used oil pastels. The students were taught about warm and cool colours and how to match colours up to fill in their tree. They also used the pastels to add a landscape. They were encouraged to try a blending technique.

We had another student finish a research project on his own time. He wanted to teach us a little more about rocks and minerals. 

Here are a few more of our frequent flyers for this week!

Congratulations to our new Student of the Week!