It's difficult to believe we are
wrapping up the second month of the school year. The Grade 3 students continue
to be inquisitive, creative students and are becoming more independent with each
passing day.
In math, we are working towards building
proficiency adding and subtracting two digit numbers with regrouping. Students
have been working with number lines and base ten blocks as strategies. Students
have engaged in problem solving in groups, recording our thinking and solutions
on vertical whiteboards and even on the classroom windows. We visited
Bridgeland Market to collect price information about healthy snacks which we
will use to create a classroom store where students will use play money to skip
count, add and subtract.
Reading groups have become a regular
routine in our classroom. Students alternate between reading with me,
researching an animal on the ipads, reading a science article, visiting our
learning commons and performing a readers' theatre.
Students have created rhyming books
which we will share with Kindergarten buddies in the weeks ahead. To create
their books, students learned to use the laptops (MacBooks), specifically
GoogleDocs. It was a steep learning curve, but they are really enjoying the
process and hopefully have taken some time to log in at home and share their
work with you. Students have found it a lot of fun to silly stories online
(just google wacky web tales); writing these stories helps them to learn parts
of speech.
Our October field studies took us to the
Bow Habitat Station where we learned about the life cycle stages of the rainbow
trout and fished in the station's Kids Can Catch Trout Pond. The students were
very successful at reeling in a lot of algae. We visited the Glenbow Museum and
learned to identify minerals, then practiced sketching techniques in the West
Africa gallery. We welcomed Miss Alex, a structural engineer into our classroom
and she worked with us to build and test bridge designs. Finally, we went on a
community walk to explore how rocks and minerals are used in Bridgeland.
Students commented on everything from the kinds of pebbles found on the
playground, the soil and the concrete used in construction.
The November parent-teacher-student
conferences will provide a great opportunity to see student work and to ask
questions. See you all there!
