Wednesday, October 21

 Hi parents,

We've had a pretty good week so far. It's been very art-centred.

The students have been working on watercolour lions with colourful manes. I'm hoping we can use them for Art Cards! This activity has also been a good way to practice blending paints, and using the bristles of a paintbrush to create hair-like textures.

In Math, we've been talking about fractions, and how fractions can apply to groups of objects rather than just a singular object (for example a pizza) being divided up. For example, the students in Room 3 are all 'whole', but if you look at the class as the whole, then the students all become fractions of it. Today we had 24/26 kids in class.

In the afternoon we did Daily LA. We also started a second art project, kind of an Art Cards backup plan, in which the students zoomed way in on a flower and focused on sketching and shaded carefully to illustrate the different textures and colours.

For writing, we've been doing "Same Topic" Spelling Sentences. This helps to build paragraph writing skills, by connecting each sentence to one main topic. 

Have a nice night,

Zac

Halloween Parade

 

Spelling Words (Week of Oct. 18)

 Spelling List A (Oct. 16 – 23)

germs	over	very	ever	term
herd	verb	fern	barn	corn

 

Spelling List B (Oct.  16 – 23)

perk	were	order	after	water
enter	river	later	sharpen	short

 

Spelling List C (Oct. 16 – 23)

anger	opera	boxer	sewers	person
mother	Germany	suffer	snarled	force

Here are the spelling words for this week. The theme is '-er'. I've included a couple review words from the previous two weeks too!

Good luck!

Friday, October 16

 Hi parents,

We had a good day today, and it was pretty much all work time.

The students got a lot accomplished for sure. We also did some reading with our buddy class, and visited the book fair.

Please let me know if you're interested in volunteering for our walking field trip on October 26! Also, let me know if you need help booking a conference - the first day of conferences is on Monday!

Have a nice weekend,

Zac

Thursday, October 15

 Hi parents,

We had a pretty good day today!

In the morning, we reviewed fractions in math. Students were tasked with dividing different 2-D shapes into equal quarters. This was hard with triangles but they eventually figured it out. I bet they could show you!

For Printing Practice, we discussed proper nouns and practiced the capital letters C, D, and E.

In French, we learned the names of family members. 

In the afternoon, we used the Montessori Bodies of Water Material to help with sketching and labelling different types of water bodies, using academic vocabulary. The students are doing an excellent job of this, and the room stayed quiet the whole time - always a good sign that they're focused and enjoying the work.

Walking Field Trip - Fish Creek Library - October 26 (Volunteers Wanted!)

We will be going on. a walking field trip to Fish Creek Library the morning of October 26. More information will be sent out tomorrow or early next week, but if you're interested in volunteering, please let me know! Its a free field trip, similar to what we did last year.

The spelling quiz on -ar is tomorrow! 

Have a nice night,

Zac

Tuesday, October 13

 Hi parents,

I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving weekend!

We had a good first day back at school. We played the math game Classroom of Doom, and did some picture prompt story writing.

The students did an awesome job with this. 

We did more writing, in the form of 'spelling sentences', and this week's twist was Dialogue Practice. Students had to use each of their spelling words in a separate sentence, and each of those sentences also had to be written as dialogue, including quotation marks and a dialogue verb (said, asked, etc.).

We also did Daily LA and played Bench Ball in gym.

Please book a conference if you haven't already done so!

Zac

Spelling Words (Week of October 11)

 Spelling List A (Oct. 9 – 16)

are	art	cars	far	star
arch	park	hard	barn	form

 

Spelling List B (Oct.  9 – 16)

harmed	cards	harden	marked	barking
scars	shark	party	sharpen	sworn

 

Spelling List C (Oct. 9 – 16)

stark	snarled	aren't	stared	marry
alarmed	scary	parcel	embark	worst

Here are the spelling words for next week! You'll notice I've included one 'or' word on each list - my plan is to include 1-3 review words each week to make sure students don't completely forget the previous letter patterns they've learned. Hopefully having an -or word will help them distinguish between -or and -ar sounds more easily too.

Good luck!

Friday, October 9

 Hi parents,

Its been a great week! Today the students were able to finish even more of their work from earlier in the week, and while not everyone got it all done, I was really impressed by the dedication and hard work. I think the new system of prioritizing certain tasks is paying off too and helping students who are a bit slower to still complete the most important things.

We met with our buddies and read books on Epic.

We did some Halloween-inspired drawing lessons. I haven't had a chance to mark the spelling quiz yet, but we did do that too.

Stay tuned for next week's words, and have a great Thanksgiving weekend!

Zac

Thursday, October 8

 Hi parents,

We had a great day today, it was exceptionally productive. No new work was added, which gave the class plenty of time to finish everything from earlier in the week. Long Work Periods like today's a great for me too as I have plenty of opportunities to work one on one with lots of different students. Plus, they're a great way to build time management skills.

Along with work time, we practiced neat printing and brainstormed proper nouns, and we reviewed the French numbers to 10 and learned (but probably forgot) how to say how old you are in French.

In the afternoon we did Daily LA and read more of Charlotte's Web.

Tomorrow is the -or spelling quiz.

Have a nice night!

Zac

Wednesday, October 7

 Hi parents,

We had a pretty good day today! The students have a ton of work on the go right now, so tomorrow and Friday will have plenty of work period time. I'm trying to structure the weeks a little different this year, and overload the class with work for the first couple days, and then give them plenty of time to finish it for the rest of the week. I've noticed this group seems to take a while to get started, but once they're in the zone, they actually work really efficiently. 

We've been talking a lot about 'character traits', and the students have created characters that could be friends with Wilbur (the pig from Charlotte's web) in some alternate version of the story.

Today we went a step further with this work, and the students were tasked with choosing four character traits they didn't know the meanings of, looking up the meaning, and then writing a sentence about a person, real or fictional, that embodies that trait. For example, "Spiderman is altruistic because he puts himself in danger to protect others. Malfoy is arrogant because he think's he's better than other wizards and picks on Hermione."

In math, we're working on addition and subtraction with whole numbers. For example, 94 - 30, or 250 - 70. Ideally these questions should be pretty easy for kids in Grade 3/4, but not everybody has had that moment where the pattern 'clicks'. I'm hoping with some explicit practice, it will happen for everybody very soon. :)

In Social Studies, the students labelled cities and towns on maps of Alberta and Canada.

Parent Teacher Conference Bookings are now open (for real this time), so please book a spot soon!

Have a nice night,

Zac

Monday, October 5

 Hi parents,

Picture Day went great today. I've never had so many students get so dressed up, it was awesome.

For writing, we built on the theme of last week's Spelling Sentences Twist, in which the students had to write sentences with adverbs, verbs, adjectives, and nouns. This time they had to write sentences about things they were thankful for. I think being forced to include adverbs and adjectives made this writing a lot more unique than your average gratitude journaling. 

We went over this week's spelling words, and talked about the 'or' sound. We read Chapter 5 of Charlotte's Web, and did Daily LA. The students also had Gym and Music in the morning.

In math, I taught the class some mental math tricks for solving problems involving 11's and 12's, by first adding or subtracting 10, and then counting on 1-2 more times.

Parent Teacher Conferences are now open for booking - please book a conference as soon as you can!

Have a nice night,

Zac