We had a busy week in 3A. The students are working hard and are starting to settle into our classroom routines. Please be sure to sign your child's agenda and have a discussion regarding their number on the behaviour chart every night. Your support and encouragement at home really helps with positive behaviours in the classroom.
Following is a curricular update for the week:
Reading Workshop
During Reader's Workshop we focused on the comprehension strategy "use prior knowledge to connect to text." Have you ever read a story and been able to connect on a personal level with the character or storyline? Do you notice that is is easier to read and comprehend something that you have background knowledge, or schema, of? This is because readers bring information from what they already know or what they have previously read about a topic and connect it with what they are reading. This increases their understand of the book and helps them remember what they have read. I used the story "Goldie Socks and the Three Libearians" by Jackie Hopkins as a mentor text to teach this strategy. Most students have prior knowledge of the story "Goldilocks and the Three Bears" that helped them better understand and make sense of the story.
Writing Workshop
Every Monday we will begin our Writing Workshop by responding to a journal prompt. With journal writing prompts, students are provided a variety of questions and sentence starters to begin their journal entry. For many students this takes away the pressure of having to choose a writing topic and allows them to just freely write. This gives me a great deal of information about the students' development as writers, the stages of spelling they are in and allows me to pinpoint weaker areas students may need mini-lessons on.
This week's prompt was "I am in Grade Three." They were asked to write about anything to do with being in Grade Three.
The students also wrote the good copies and illustrated their
"Favourite Summer Memory" to put in their memory binder.
Making Words - Until our spelling program is underway I will have the students participating in hands-on activities to build their phonemic awareness and spelling skills. This week I introduced "Making Words" in which the students select letters to build short and long words. They were given 7 letters and worked to build words according to clues given to then. Some of the students were even able to come up with the "secret" word that used all 7 letters! It was "AWESOME!"
Math
We began our patterning unit this week. The following goals were covered:
PA3-1 Counting On
Goals:
Students will find the difference or gap between two numbers mentally and/or by using their
fingers.
PA3-2 Number Patterns Made by Adding
Goals:
Students will find a number that is more than another number by a given difference.
Students will extend simple number patterns made by adding a constant difference.
Students will solve word problems involving number patterns made by adding.
Science
The students are working very hard on their "Rocks and Minerals" lap books. They have really enjoyed putting the information about rocks and minerals together in such a fun way. This week we focused on learning about the different types of rocks and the difference between rocks and minerals.
Rock Walk
The students had a great time going on our Rock Walk on Thursday.
We enjoyed a picnic lunch in Lion's Park before heading down to the boat launch to collect our rocks. The students enjoyed searching for different rocks for their collection. They can't wait to sort them according to their different attributes. What can I say.....kids LOVE rocks! Thank you to our parents who joined us on our walk. It was great to have you along!
Rock Talk
The students in 3A love bringing in their rocks for our "Rock Talk" time!
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