Pet Rocks

For Art this week, the students spent some time looking at examples and talking about different ways to create a pet rock. Choosing the largest rock they collected from our rock walk, they used acrylic paint to paint their rocks and then had a supply of pipe cleaners, feathers, pom poms and googly eyes to make their pet rocks come "alive".

The students did their weekly Journal writing. They started by answering the question from their reply last week and then continued with a new entry. They were encouraged to write five sentences with proper capitalization and punctuation. The Journals will be available for you to look through at Parent-Teacher Interviews.

We read "Billy's World" and "The Day They Saved Their Majesty" from the Collections Series this week. It is wonderful to see that more students are volunteering to read aloud to the class. 

 We started our new spelling program this week. On Monday morning, the students were given a "pretest" on a particular group of words. This week we focused on words that had initial consonant blends of sp, st, sw, sn, sm, sc, sk, tr, tw, and short vowel sounds. The students were given their study list depending on the mark they received on their pretest. Their words for the week also included five high frequency words which will be part of our class word wall. A parent note was sent home about this program last week. If you did not see one in your child's mailbag, please write us a note in their agenda or send us a quick email so that we can send you a new one.

 After writing the pretest, we brainstormed other words that could go with the initial consonant blends. Then we talked about the difference between words with short and long vowel sounds.

During the week we will spend some time working on the spelling words. This week, the students completed a "Write and Draw" activity which focuses on the meaning of the spelling word. The students have to print their word and come up with a drawing to show the meaning. This is a great activity for the students to demonstrate what they know about new vocabulary words. 

They also used their spelling words to practice writing complete sentences. The focus was on using the word in the correct context and spelling it correctly. The students were able to use their personal dictionaries for this activity.

For our "Read to Self" block on Monday, we decided to buddy up with the Grade One class across the hall. The Grade 3 students will have the opportunity to pair up and read them books from the library or from our classroom collection. This is a great chance for our Grade 3 students to increase their confidence while reading aloud to others. They will also be able to work on their expression and fluency. The little ones will have a chance to work on their reading as they continue to learn how to read words. Both of the classes are very excited to have reading buddies. 

We have been focusing on good sentence writing. All sentences contain a "naming part" (noun) and a "telling part" (verb). This week, the students worked on sorting incomplete and complete sentences. Our hope was that the students will transfer this knowledge to their work and we have already seen an improvement in their writing.

We completed 2 more handwriting letters this week. The students were really excited to be able to spell DAD this week after they were taught how to properly form the cursive letter Dd. They also learned how to form a Gg. The introduction of the letters is done as a gradual progression based on the formation of the letters rather than in alphabetical order. 

This week in Math, we worked on backwards number patterns. Students were given a starting point between 0 and 100 and skip counted backwards by 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10. The class was also given a short quiz to review number patterns.

 

We continued playing "Tic Tac Twelve" to work on their addition facts. We also learned a new game called "End to End". This game has a bit more strategy where the students have to choose between adding or subtracting two chosen numbers in order to cover all of the numbers on their game board.

In Science, we learned how the three rock types, igneous, sedimentary and metamorphic, fit into the Rock Cycle. The students read a few books about how the rock cycle works and watched a short video.

We also talked about the different properties of rocks and minerals, such as, colour, lustre, hardness, texture, shape. After reading and discussing the rock properties, the students added this information into their lab books. Next week, the students will be using a few rocks from their collection to identify the properties.

Unfortunately, the weather this week was not cooperating and we ended up having quite a few indoor recesses! The students made the best of this and enjoyed being creative and playing with the bins we have in our classroom.