In the morning, we learned about Tim Burton, and discussed the meaning of 'gothic fantasy' art. We looked at many iconic Tim Burton characters and looked for shared traits. Then, the students created their own Tim Burton-inspired self portraits. They look so awesome.
We did an adjective writing challenge, in which the students had to write three adjectives to describe each of their classmates costumes.
We had Music in the afternoon, as well as the Halloween parade. Sorry we went through the gym so fast! I don't know how that always happened, we even practiced going through slowly in the morning, but somehow we ended up tailgating Ms. Adamson's class anyway....
At the end of the day, we had our 'Halloween Party' - outside! How many opportunities in life do you get to build snowmen in Halloween costumes?
We had a good day today, maybe a bit less productive than I would've hoped, but I think that's just the pre-Halloween energy.
In the morning, the class wrote in their journals. They had the option to write about their weekend, their halloween costume, or their favourite halloween tradition.
In math, we've continued to learn about regrouping, but now we're moving into subtraction. Using regrouping in subtraction is one of the hardest, if not the hardest thing students learn in math until Grade 5. That being said, I think all our work around place value has helped students feel more comfortable. It's kind of the opposite of addition regrouping, where the objective is to exchange ones for tens. With subtraction, we exchange a group of ten for 10 ones.
The golden beads make it make sense.
In the afternoon, we did Daily LA, and then we learned a bit about the history of Halloween from a funny youtube video.
Tomorrow is Halloween!
Please see the image below for information. We've got a lot of fun, yet shockingly educational things planned, and we hope you can make it to the school for the Halloween Parade at 1:00pm!
Today was a great way to wrap up our week. The students had a lot of time to finish up their writing, art, and 'plant fashion' work.
Our focus was editing. The students had a full 35 minutes to edit and revise their paragraphs. They read their work aloud, and listened to their peers reading it aloud too, and tried to areas for revision. They also scanned for spelling mistakes, capitalization issues, and punctuation problems.
Some students used this time really well. Others decided it was perfect already and got a bit silly. I'm not going to fault anyone for that, because again, we haven't really learned effective editing and revision strategies yet, so I'm not expecting them to all be experts! That's what we'll be doing over the next few weeks.
We went outside to play kickball. It was a blast. It's a very different game in the snow. We'll be going outside for gym every Friday, unless it's a blue day, so please make sure your child has gloves and boots. Snowpants are always a plus too.
Stay tuned for next week's spelling words, and have a nice weekend!
We had another great day today. This has been such a fun year. :)
In the morning, students had more time to work on their earth paragraph writing. Most students are finished or almost finished. It's quite interesting to see how the paragraphs are turning out, especially since we haven't explicitly learned about paragraph writing yet. This task will serve as a great starting point so I can see what I need to teach more, and what they've already got figured out.
Students who finished early got to work on halloween-themed bonus writing.
In Science, we worked on the "Plant Fashion" task, which is always fun. It's a miniature 'interdisciplinary' project that incorporates math, science, and art elements, and even a little bit of French. We had an awesome class discussion about how clothing can be a fun way to express yourself too.
In the afternoon, we did Daily LA, Music, Mindfulness, and Printing / Cursive.
We had another great day today. The students worked so hard on their paragraphs this morning. I'm really proud of all of them. Last year, we started getting serious about paragraph writing in January, so for the students to be able to take on a writing task like this in October is really awesome.
Based on what I've seen, the biggest area for growth is going to be grammar. I've seen a lot of issues with tenses and plurals (for example: "The mountains is beautiful", or "the earth is forming millions of years ago")
It's tricky for kids to fix errors like that because even when they read their writing aloud, they don't necessarily hear anything wrong with it. I'm hoping that going over some example / non-example paragraphs as a class will help them hear the difference.
In continuing with our exploration of plants, we read a book about fashion. We talked about how many fabrics come from plants. Tomorrow, the students will be designing their own plant-fashion outfits. We did this activity last year too - it's probably one of my favourites of all time.
We ended our day with Daily LA, Art, and printing / cursive practice. I told the students the story of "The Big Toe". It's a spooky one.
BLOG HOMEWORK: Write a Topic Sentence for this paragraph. (2 points)
It is an awesome way to express yourself. You can paint landscapes, people, animals, or even things around the house. Some art is very unusual looking. It makes people wonder about what it could be showing. A world without art would be a very boring place.
We had a much better day today. In the morning, students worked on phase 2 of their paragraph planning task. We studied the "paragraph sandwich" analogy. Just as a sandwich is made complete by two buns, a paragraph needs a topic sentence, and a concluding sentence. The cheese, lettuce, bacon, etc. are the details. We talked about how its important to start a paragraph by introducing the big idea, before moving into the more specific details.
The students did an awesome job filling in their paragraph sandwich graphic organizers. Tomorrow we'll start writing them officially.
In math, the students worked on addition worksheets while I did individual golden bead lessons. They've got the hang of it for the most part. Next week we'll move on toe subtraction regrouping, which is unfortunately much, much harder.
We played pillow polo in gym, which is a fun game that is similar to floor hockey, but with soft q-tip looking sticks.
In the afternoon, we had Daily LA and music, and the students worked on their Art Card artwork.
We had an okay day today. There was a lot of chatting and off-task behaviour sadly, and so even though the students were able to get through all the work, it probably could've been better if they'd used their time more effectively.
In the morning, we worked on our good copies for our Jason Carter-inspired artwork. This part of the day actually did go pretty well, and the artwork is coming along nicely.
Our next activity involved reading through articles about Earth, and making jot notes. We're going to do a fairly big paragraph writing task later in the week, on the topic of Earth, so this activity was mostly intended to just get the gears turning. We'll follow up with some planning time tomorrow, which I hope the students take advantage of, because today's work was just okay.
In the afternoon, we did some more work in Science, and learned about Carrots. The students created venn diagrams to compare carrots with pumpkins. This was pretty fun because there are actually a lot of pretty interesting similarities and differences. We learned that pumpkins are 'fruits' and carrots are vegetables, and also that when you eat a carrot, you're eating the root of the plant.
We had a good day today. In the morning, we had our spelling quiz, and then spent an hour finishing up pumpkin projects. Just about every group was able to finish, and I think the students learned quite a bit about pumpkins, and plants in general. They also built skills for group work and research which will serve them well through the rest of the year.
In math, we used the golden beads to show the concept of regrouping in larger numbers. We talked abut how "carrying the one" is really just exchanging 10 in one place value spot with 1 of the next place value spot, whether you're exchanging 10 ones for a ten, or 10 hundreds for 1000, it's all the same basic concept.
We played kickball in gym with our new kickball teams, which seem to be really evenly matched. Sportsmanship and team spirit were both excellent. The blue team is still unnamed.
In the afternoon, we worked on our Art Card good copies, did Daily LA, and the students went to Music.
There is no school tomorrow, so stay tuned for next week's spelling words and have a great weekend!
Today we continued working on our pumpkin research projects, which are coming along really nicely. We'll finish them up tomorrow ideally.
In math, the Grade 3 students worked on some addition with regrouping worksheets, while the Grade 4s started to work on addition with regrouping with decimals. We used the golden beads to illustrate the concepts. Thankfully, the adding itself is pretty much the same.
In the afternoon, we had Daily LA, and then worked on second drafts of Jason Carter inspired artwork. This time, the students were asked to make sure it was 'Winter-themed'. These drafts seemed slightly further from Jason Carter's style for some reason. I think we'll have to revisit those defining elements (dark lines, shapes, animals, bold colours) before starting the final copies.
At the end of the day, the students were put in new kickball teams. It was challenging for the students to decide on team names collaboratively. One team is still trying to figure a name out.
Math Quizzes
I sent home the math quizzes at the end of the day. I'm really proud of the students - this was a pretty difficult quiz that covered a lot of content. If anyone is feeling unhappy with their scores, they're welcome to do a 're-do', which would just be the same quiz but featuring different number values.
We have no school on Friday, so tomorrow is our spelling quiz!
We had a pretty good day today! In the morning the students started on "The Pumpkin Project", which is a buddy research project on pumpkins. We're using books from Epic to find information. The finished project will occupy four sketchbook pages and look something like this (hopefully better):
It also features a life cycle and fun facts on pages 3 and 4.
In math, we continued to work on regrouping with addition. We're starting to transition from golden beads to standard algorithms. This is review for a lot of Grade 4s but soon we'll start doing the same thing with decimal numbers, which will be new.
In the afternoon, we had Daily LA, Music, and printing / cursive practice.
We had a pretty good day today! In the morning, students wrote in their journals - either about their weekends, or in response to the "Guess my Halloween Costume" prompt. Basically, for this activity, they had to describe their costume in detail, without giving it away, and then challenge the reader to guess what it is. I know the students did a similar writing a project a few years back, but it was fun to revisit it with all of their new skills.
I have officially marked the math quizzes and will send them home tomorrow! All around students showed that they've got the hang of place value and comparing numbers. Rounding is still a bit of a challenge but it's something we can keep working on as we move on to other topics.
On that note - we started learning about 'regrouping' using the Golden Beads material. Regrouping is basically the process of 'carrying the one' and 'borrowing' in addition and subtraction. The golden beads make it easy to visualize that process so it doesn't just become a magical algorithm. But we will eventually be learning that algorithm too because it's a lot more efficient than the beads.
The students cut out their own personal sets of paper golden beads. They're not as good as the real thing (which we have three sets of), but they're great for working through problems together as a whole class.
In the afternoon, we did Daily LA, and learned about the artist Jason Carter. We had some fantastic discussions about his artwork, and his artistic style. We brainstormed common elements found in all of his paintings - landscapes, animals, shapes, dark lines, and bold colours. The students tried their hand at Jason Carter-inspired art in their sketchbooks. We're warming up for our "Art Card Fundraiser", which is going to feature original artwork from the students, inspired by Jason Carter's work, but still incorporating tons of each student's individual styles.
We had a pretty good day today, all things considered. The spelling quiz went great. The math quiz was a bit more challenging, but the students rose to the challenge and persevered! The rounding was a struggle. Pretty much everything else was good.
We did Daily LA, and went outside for a chilly kickball game. This time the sportsmanship was much better even though the Red Pandas managed to win yet again.
We had a good discussion about mindfulness, sleep, and dreams. We ended our day by reading an awesome story from Wayside School about Joy.
Stay tuned for next week's spelling words, and have a nice weekend!
Today was a bit of a catch-up day for our class. In the morning, the students wrote complete sentences for all ten of their spelling words. We had a 90 minute work period to catch up on work from earlier in the week, and to complete this daunting task.
We met with our buddies and helped them to use the I-pads to access Epic and Storyline Online. We also had Music and a Fire Drill.
In math, we revisited the concept of rounding, and introduced the idea of rounding to the nearest whole number. The class caught on to this pretty quickly.
There is a bit of rounding on the quiz tomorrow, and I think it may benefit students to quickly review rounding to different place values, up to the ten-thousands place.
You could practice this by taking a big number, let's say '41,837', and rounding it to the nearest ten (41,840), the nearest hundred (41,800), the nearest thousand (42,000), and the nearest ten thousand (40,000).
On that note - tomorrow is Friday the 13th, and it does seem to be shaping up to be an unlucky day, as we're also having our spelling quiz.
We had a pretty good day today. It was a bit louder than usual but that's probably because the rain put a damper on our morning exercise break.
In the morning we watched this classic 90's commercial, and talked about the message: "Nobody's good at everything, but everybody is good at something - what's your thing?" The students wrote in their journals about their 'thing' - the challenge was that they had to pick just one thing, and write exclusively about that one topic.
In Math, we continued to learn about decimals. The students put decimal numbers in order from least to greatest, saw how a decimal number line works, and translated written decimal numbers into numeric form. For example, "Three and four tenths ---> 3.4".
In the afternoon, the students worked with Ms. Rooke and Ms. Watson to discuss and learn about the Montessori value of 'belonging and community'. Since we've been doing a lot of work around the Montessori philosophy recently in the classroom, I think the class was especially engaged.
We're having a small math quiz on Friday, to see whether we're ready to move on from Place Value!
It will contain:
-Questions on the value of a place value spot in a given number (for example, the value of the thousands place in 12,900 is '2000').
-Questions on translating a written number into numeric form (for example, writing 'one hundred thousand' as 100,000)
-Questions on ordering numbers from least to greatest
-Questions on rounding numbers to various place values
-1 expanded form word problem
Grade 4 quizzes will feature these same topics, but also include basic decimal numbers. Please do not feel obligated to practice at home - I think the students are more than ready for this. They'll have as much time as they need, and I'll be there to answer questions, read problems aloud, etc.
We ended our day with printing practice, and a bit of cursive practice for students who were feeling ready for it.
We had a good day back at school. In the morning, the students wrote about their weekends, and about the things they were thankful for.
In math, we've just taken our exploration onto place value to a whole different level, by looking into decimals. This is a Grade 4 concept but I thought it could potentially benefit the Grade 3s to learn a bit about too, as it connects to fractions which we'll be doing later in the year. We're just looking at tenths and hundredths. The main idea I'd like the students to walk away with right now is just that decimals represent parts of numbers. We'll revisit this concept later in the year in a lot more detail.
There will be a Place Value Quiz / Assessment / Check-in, whatever you like to call it, on Friday, October 13. Basically the purpose of this will be to see whether we're ready to wrap up our Place Value unit. From what I've seen the students will do great. :) I'll post more info tomorrow.
In the afternoon, we had Daily LA and Music, and we discussed and learned about the -ar sound for spelling.
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