What we have been up to this past week!

Happy October!  The weather has been beautiful and the students were able to enjoy Monday's gym class outdoors.  We also played Sharks and Pirates in the gym on Wednesday.  The students really seemed to enjoy themselves and exhibited great listening skills as well as cooperation with their peers.  The focus in Physical Education is safe play, locomotive skills, sportsmanship and participation.

In Religion, we have been learning about the Parable of the Workers in the Vineyard, the Parable of the Two Sons as well, learning more about our Board's new theme and discussing this month's Gospel Value: Community.  

The children will be working hard this month on exhibiting the qualities of working as a community (e.g., welcoming, inclusiveness, being helpful, being kind to one another, etc.) and two children in the class, will be chosen who have demonstrated these qualities throughout the month.  I hope I have a tough time choosing:).

In Language, the children have been writing partner recounts of their most favourite gym class this year.  The students have used a guiding checklist to review their work and ensure that it has a catchy title, juicy descriptive words, lots of detail (5 Ws), T.O.W. (time order words), P.T.W. (past tense words) and a closing sentence.  I have noticed that many students are forgetting to capitalize the first word in a sentence as well as spelling wwws incorrectly, so we have been looking at editing our own work to make sure it is meeting all the criteria.  We are continuing to make meaningful connections when we read and today we also talked about visualizing or making movies in our mind while we read.  Words and sentences that allow us as readers to see, taste, smell, hear, touch helps us connect to the text when we read.  It is also something to think about when we are writing our own stories and recounts.

In Math, we have been busy with Place Value.  I am so impressed with all the ways the students are able to represent numbers.  We have started using our knowledge of place value to help order numbers from least to greatest, greatest to least, circle the greatest number and explain how they know that one number is greater than another number e.g. Which number is greatest, 845 or 853?  Explain how you know.   We have been exploring some of our learning with partners and have been doing 'Gallery Walks' to look at each others' strategies so that we can learn from each other.  Yesterday and today we answered a multiple choice question and discussed some strategies to use when answering these kinds of questions.

In Science, we have been researching our inquiries about soil through the use of QR Codes on the school iPads and have used our classroom Chromebooks to look at soil websites for kids.  It was so amazing to see all the learning that took place when the children were given the opportunity to explore the various sites and videos.  The students took some notes of their new learnings and during community circle time, each shared one of their new learnings or areas of interest from their research.  Here is a link to our science QR Codes that we have so far Soil QR Codes.

In Art, we have started our good copies of our Leaf Line Art.  They are turning out to be amazing works of art!  We have some extremely creative individuals in 3D and their enthusiasm for this activity as being amazing!

Lastly, please take note that on the right side of the blog is my Twitter Feed.  I try to Tweet often and find it a great way to share pics of our adventures in grade 3.  If you scroll down you can find various tweets from this year.

I hope everyone has a restful and fun weekend.  Go REDBLACKS (esp. #49 ;)).



Important Upcoming dates:  Tomorrow is Picture Day!  Monday, October 6th - Pizza Orders and English Scholastic orders are due.