Highlights and Happenings of September

There has been a lot of learning, collaborating, sharing, inquiring, and memory-making in grade 3 so far! As a class, we are becoming a closer "team" every day, and each one of us are learning the importance of positivity, encouragement, friendship, and team work in everything we do. Please check out some updates on our learning, and feel free to contact me at any time!

• Email: amanda.brace@rbe.sk.ca
• Twitter: @msbracesclass

Literacy

• We have been working on our Daily 5, which is a literacy structure to make us better readers and writers. We have built our reading stamina enough so that we can now read for over 13 minutes without distractions! We have also been working on reading to our classmates and checking for understanding as we read.
• Everyday we work on our writing in our Daily 5. We have been focusing on adding details to our writing and brainstorming topics to write about. Students have the choice to write about what they want, which gets them excited to share their writing! We are not only becoming better writers every day, but we are improving our sharing skills as well.
  
  

Numeracy

• We are currently working on the unit Numbers to 1000. We have worked a lot on the skill of showing a number in many ways, comparing and ordering numbers, and are currently working on skip counting. We have practiced these skills by playing math games online and doing activities on the iPad, playing games with friends, working individually, working in small groups, and doing activities as a whole group.

 

Social Studies

• In Social Studies we are learning about Communities. We have talked about communities in our own lives and brainstormed what communities need in order to run properly. We even went on a community walk around our school to observe the details of our school and Glencairn community. We love using Google Earth to look at the characteristics of our communities and will continue to use this tool as we study communities around the world. We will soon talk about urban and rural communities as well as communities in the past and present by looking at what Aboriginal communities in Canada were like before European contact.

 

Health

• We have been learning about our well-being and the importance of staying healthy in all aspects of our lives. We talked about our shared values; such as responsibility, belonging, learning, and respect, and made goals based on those values and the Circle of Courage. We continue to learn about the importance of keeping all areas of our lives balanced, and our goals help us focus on that. 
• Soon we will be looking more in depth at friendship, kindness, and how to become better classmates and people!

Phys-Ed

• We have been playing a lot of cooperative games that focus on the skills of team work and working together. Our Phys-Ed activities include a lot of loco-motor movements and skills that challenge us and allow us to explore our creativity!

Art

• We had so much fun with our art on Dot Day, which was a day we dedicated solely to creativity and self-expression. We created dot art, which is a picture only made up of painted dots. Check out our blog post that displays our fun experiences on Dot Day. 
• We have been working on an art project called Fall Frames, which incorporates fall colours and characteristics, as well as the students photographs. Stay tuned for the final product!

Science

• We will be switching between Health and Science units throughout the year, and we are starting with Health, which means Science topics will be studied more in depth closer to November. 
• Even though we are starting with Health, we have used a lot of our science skills when we participated in the city-wide egg drop project called Regina Public School Egg Drop Contest. Our class created egg-vessels that allowed eggs to drop from a play structure without being cracked. We were fortunate enough to have CBC News come and tape our experience, and then air it on the 5 o’clock news! Please see the previous blog post about our Egg Drop experience for more details!

French

• Mrs. Turner teaches the grade 3’s French this year.

Cultural Education

• Mrs. Nault teaches the grade 3’s Cultural Education this year.

Technology 

• The integration of computer and iPad technology within the curriculum will be implemented throughout our continued learning. We use technology daily; in the form of Twitter within the class; our use of the iPad for curriculum based activities in  whole group instruction as well as small group and individual, and in our daily computer use for varied curriculum outcomes. 
• Our class learns so many new things by using Twitter in the classroom. We have a lot of questions, and we are able to get some answers by creating conversation  through Twitter! We also love sharing our learning experiences and using our voice to connect with others.

• With technology becoming a staple in our everyday lives, communicating through email and website is a sure way to keep in contact with me. Our class webpage and Twitter page is a way for us to keep updated but also a great resource for your child to use. Our class updates will be posted to our blog, as well as our Twitter account, so please check back regularly.  Feel free to interact with the class when using these tools as well!