October 9 - 13

I hope everyone had a wonderful Thanksgiving weekend with your family and friends! Although it was a short week, the students accomplished a great deal.

Writing Workshop

I enjoyed reading my student's journals this week. It seems like everyone had a fun Thanksgiving weekend. The students continue to work on proper paragraph structure in their journal writing.

This week we continued to work on using adjectives to make our writing more descriptive. We brainstormed different adjectives to describe monsters and then the students were asked to complete their "Monster Mad Libs." The students also did a "quick draw" and then wrote two descriptive sentence to describe their monster.

Reading Workshop

This week our focus was on using Elaborative Detail in our writing. First I read the story I Need My Monster by Amanda Noll to get us thinking about how to make our writing more interesting by including details. While most of the great description of the monsters occurs through the pictures in this book, there are fabulous describing words and phrases woven throughout this story about imaginary monsters. We discussed how vivid word choice and specific detail not only make for an interesting paragraph, but become powerful tools for building vocabulary. 

Wow, what amazing readers we have in 3A! Congratulations to those students how have reached the 600, 1200 and 1800 destinations!

Math

This week in math we focused on Patterns on Number Lines. The students learned represent patterns given on number lines as number patterns and describe the pattern rule for number patterns.

Social Studies

In social studies this week the students learned about the map "key" and had the opportunity to use compasses. Using the compasses, we were able to identify "landmarks" in various directions from the school.

Art

The students did an excellent job of their art project this week. They created "Scarecrow Faces" using watercolour paint. They followed a direct drawing lesson first to create the scarecrow's face. Then the students created a water colour resist using wax crayons for the straw. This is the first time we have used water colour in our classroom. The students really took their time learning to use the right amount of water and to blend their paints. Please be sure to take a look at your child's art work when you come in for parent meetings on October 25th.

Congratulations to our Student of the Week! Thank you for bringing Timbits to share with the class!

Have a great weekend everyone!