Saturday 18 November 2017

Dressing for the weather...

The weather has been quite chilly the last couple of weeks and a lot of students are coming to school without hats, mittens and snow pants. Please make sure your child is dressed appropriately for recess. Some of the students are coming in quite cold and covered in snow which results in wet clothing!


For journal writing on Tuesday the students were able to share what they did on the long weekend. Each week, the students are encouraged to form complete sentences with capitals and end punctuation. We hope to see improvements in their journal writing over the weeks, which includes spelling words and WWW to be properly spelled.  


We have finished reading "Freckle Juice" as a class. We will continue working through a few activities to wrap up the unit. This week, we worked on a venn diagram, comparing and contrasting two characters from the book, Sharon and Andrew. The students came up with words and phrases to describe the characters and then placed them in the appropriate spots on the diagram.




We also worked through an activity called Grammar Juice. The students were given a list of words used in the book and had to identify which part of speech they belonged to ~ noun, verb or adjective. 


The final activity this week was to write contractions for the words given. For example, the first sentence said....Andrew did not have any freckles. did not ~ didn't

 

We also started a new writing project working on opinion paragraphs. We began by reading the book, "I am the Dog, I am the Cat". Then we read an article comparing dogs and cats as household pets. We stopped after each paragraph to discuss and highlight the important facts. As a class, we made a list about the benefits of having each animal as a pet. 





We then took that information and began an opinion writing assignment. We used sentence starters and broke the paragraph up into a topic sentence (stating your opinion), four facts to back the opinion and a concluding sentence. 



This week we completed 2 more cursive letters in our handwriting book ~ Oo and Hh. The students have now been taught the proper formation for 15 of the 26 alphabet letters. They have learned Aa, Dd, Gg, Qq, Cc, Ii, Uu, Ww, Tt, Jj, Pp, Rr, Ss, Oo and Hh.


Our WWW this week were...they're, their, there, let's and recycle. The students used these 5 words to make their rainbow sentences. The focus of this activity is creating sentences of appropriate length, starting with a capital and ending with punctuation. The WWW word also needs to be spelled correctly and in the right context. We discuss the meaning of all of our WWW prior to the sentence writing.

In Math, we worked on the following concepts.

1. Reading and writing number words for numbers between 0 and 99.
2. Reading and writing numbers words for three digit numbers.




We learned a new place value game. The students used three 9 sided dice to roll three digit numbers. Using the three numbers they rolled, they tried to make the greatest number. For example, if a student rolled a 2, 6, 1, they should know to make 621 in order to have the highest number and try to win the round.



We also assigned some place value activities on Mathletics for the kids to complete. They are welcome to work on these at home. Their user name and passwords are in the front of their agenda (they know where to find them).


In Science this week we talked about sound being the result of vibrations. We did a short experiment using a ruler. The students were asked to hold the ruler at certain lengths on their desk and then pluck the ruler. They discovered that the longer the ruler, the slower the vibrations which resulted in a lower pitch. A shorter ruler had faster vibrations which resulted in a higher pitch.


We also watched a video on How Your Ears Work This is a great short video to introduce the kids to the parts of the ear and what each part is responsible for. We then labelled another section to our lap book.


Our students always look forward to seeing their buddies. We are very lucky to have them right across the hall! We try to get together each week for "Buddy Reading" and we meet them every Friday for assembly.




We started a new winter art project. The students watched a short video to learn about cardinals and then we completed a directed drawing. They carefully painted the foreground of their picture and will finish the background next week. Stay tuned for the completed masterpieces!!! 




Our super reader this week...


Please monitor your child's progress in our home reading program. We have a few students still at the start of the Amazing Race. Your child should be very close to 600 minutes by this point in grade 3. As soon as their reading sheet totals 600 minutes, please have your child show us. If you have misplaced your sheet, put a note in your child's agenda and we will get a new one into their reading bag. 

One day this week, the students had a "free choice" gym class. We discussed how to be respectful of the equipment and the storage area. They were able to try out some of the equipment we haven't used yet and HAD A BLAST!



Healthy Hearts and Minds is incorporated into our day in a variety of ways. Go Noodle is a class favourite and allows the students to complete a range of gross motor movement and mindful activities as a break during the day.

Congratulations to our new Student of the Week!!!


















No comments:

Post a Comment

LAST WEEK!

The last week of school was a BLAST and filled with fun activities such as Fun Day, our class party, the Triathlon and free swim! I ...