3FT Third Grade Thoughts: 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! :)