Happy Thanksgiving Everyone!

 I would first like to wish everyone a joyful and reflective Thanksgiving weekend with all of your loved ones.  Thanksgiving is a time to reflect on what we are so fortunate to have as well as reach out to others who are in need.  The amount of food that is coming in for the Barrhaven Food Bank is astounding.  Please keep it coming in if you are able to do so.  The campaign will be running until the 27th of October.  The children are so excited to see our food donations accumulate and have been counting the items each morning.  Yesterday we were at 53 items!  Wow!

This week in Religion, we created an anchor chart (Graphiti Style) of our thinking of what the new board theme means. We described the symbolic meaning of the circles and how that links to this month's gospel theme: community.
The children also came up with a comprehensive list of all the things they are grateful for and why.  Today they will be bringing home their Thanksgiving Pumpkins with 10 thankful reflections written on them.  The students worked really hard on their pumpkins and are excited to show them off this weekend!

Dance-A-Thon:  A letter as well as a donation envelope went home yesterday.  The Dance-A-Thon will take place during the day on October 31st!  The Dance-A-Thon is a Parent Council initiative for technology in the school.  Technology is an amazing way to capture student thinking in the classroom, engage learners in the classroom and prepare students for 21st century learning.  Very exciting!

In math, we continue to work with numbers to 1000.  We are showing our thinking when responding to multistep problems and are practicing our mental math skills.  Towards the latter part of next week we will be doing a baseline assessment for 2 digit by 2 digit addition and subtraction.  Over the long weekend, students can be practicing their math skills by counting items around the house and adding the numbers together and they can practice their math using Dreambox, ABCya and/or Prodigy (please see links on the right-hand side of the blog).

 

In Language, we will be writing a final assessment of Recount writing next week about the children's Thanksgiving Weekend.  I encourage the children to add more detail to their writing using the 5 w's (who, what, where, when, why) as well as adding their feelings linked to the topic, juicy adjectives and a catchy opening sentence and summarizing closing sentence.  We have also had a wonderful start to the Global Read Aloud 'The North Star'.  The story was a fantastic way to start!  This week we made connections to the story, visualized while hearing the story and talked about the Author's Message in the story.  We tweeted a question to another grade 3 class in our school board and heard back yesterday.  We will also be adding some of our thinking to a Padet that involves a grade 3 class in our board as well as a class from the United States:).  Fun!

Lastly, enjoy your weekend together as a family and I look forward to hearing all about the happenings over the weekend on Tuesday:).

Your Partner in Education,

Mrs. Caluori