What a Wonderful Last Two Weeks!

We have sure been busy these last two weeks, between concert rehearsals, performances and Potter Party festivities! Thank you all for your support through it all!

Language Arts

This month, we have been doing a little Author Study on Jan Brett. We have read many books by her, compared them, looked into their inspirations, made connections to self and texts, and researched Jan herself. 

Initially, we started with the classic, The Mitten, and students created their own adaptations. They did wonderful with this project! 

Next,we read The Wild Christmas Reindeer, to inspire our Christmas Concert art! Students used cardboard, yard, and googly eyes to create little reindeer! (We just had to have red noses, too!)

This week, we read Trouble with Trolls we looked at the folklore of trolls during some reading comprehension activities, and then learned how to draw trolls.

 

 

On KidBlog, as well as in class, students discussed which book we had read so far was their favourite. On KidBlog the expressed their opinions in paragraph format and we also made a pictograph in class. 

Finally, we had to learn a little about the Author behind all these great stories! Students took sometime during WeSearch Wednesday to read up about Jan Brett, where she's from and how she gets ideas for her book. Using google drawings every student because a People Magazine editor! Creating a front page spread of Jan Brett, with some snippets and fun information! I think these turned absolutely awesome!!!!!!

 

 

Math

This week, I took some time to work with students in small groups to reinforce some concepts within addition and subtraction. When adding and subtracting, regrouping tens to hundreds, and hundreds to thousands can be a difficult concept. We will continue to work on these skills after break.

Students also participated in multiple card games, dice activities, and IXL math to strengthen their basic math skills. Lots of these card and dice games can be played at home and over the break!

Salute (3ppl)
Ask your child to try and teach you this one! It takes three players and a deck of cards. You can take out J, Q, & K. Aces = 1.

Horse Races!
This one is a bit tough to play at home, as we use 36 dies. But you could play too, first to 18 points wins!

Science 4 
This week we have taken a look at packaging and its purpose. Students looked at three different brands of chips, and compared their packaging.

- What is the purpose of each type of packaging?
- Why would a manufacturer use this type of packagaing?
- How do we dispose of this packaging?
- What raw materials are used to make this packaging?
- Is all of it necessary, or can we reduce some packaging to reduce its environmental impact.

Next, we looked at how different types of packaging is made, such as cartons, plastic bottles and glass bottles. Students are creating flowchart projects where they follow a product from its source to the table, as well as the packaging's source to table!

Social 3 

The focus in social this week has been on Leaders in communities around the world. We took a look at leaders in our homes, schools, communities and countries. Students worked on creating lists of qualities you would find in a leader and the type of decisions they have to make. 

Looking at the leaders in India, we compared the similarities and differences of our leaders. India also has a Prime Minister of their country, as well as mayors in their cities! In small town and villages it is a bit different than ours, as they have Panchayat's (small councils that help make decisions) and a Development Officer who can have up to 200 villages to look after! 

Fun Days! 

We celebrated Hot Cocoa day with our hallway mates! 

Well Done Grade 3/4 at the Christmas Concert!

POTTER PARTY DAY!

Our First House Cup winners were...

HUFFLEPUFF!

We filled our day with wand making, movie watching and snack eating! 

Mrs. K even stopped by for some Christmas Cracker fun!

Happy Holidays! 

See you all next year!

A Quick Update!

A Few Reminders: 

• Friday Dec. 22nd is PJ & Stuffy Day!
• Last day of Classes is Dec. 22!

Reading

Our reading strategy of focus this week was Making Predictions: What is going to happen next? This differs from our inferring skills, as inferring is more about what is happening now, based on clues. Whereas, making predictions is mixing our background knowledge with text clues to guess what will happen next. 

Again to introduce on KidBlog, we watched a fun video, called Carrot Crazy.  I stopped the video at 2:58 and asked students - What do you think will happen next? It is important that when we make predictions we can support them with evidence from the media or text. 

During class discussion, we used the visual of a crystal ball to talk about predictions. Thinking of fortune tellers, they tell us what will happen next. To reinforce our skills, I read the students the book Tuesday by David Wiesner. This is a book with mainly pictures, so this left open lots of room for predictions! This was a great way to have students using these skills in a non-intimidating way, through visuals and media. 

As I read aloud from Fart Powder, students make predictions about our chapter. They will be reinforcing this skill during independent reading time next week. 

Writing 

Over the next month, we will be doing a little bit of an Author Study around Jan Brett. To kick off this study, we read The Mitten. This is a Ukranian folktale adapted by Jan Brett, about a group of animals squishing into a little mitten. We looked at the word adapted, and discussed how this means Jan did not create the story, but had changed it a bit. Well, this is a great idea! So we wrote our own adapted tales! 

Using what we have learned from our JoAnne Moore sentence building, we wrote Adapted The Mitten stories. For every new animal that came into the story, they have to use one of our various sentence starters! The kiddos did awesome with this, and ended up creating some hilarious versions!

We also took some time to talk about Christmas, and it's true meaning. I read aloud the book, The Light of Christmas where a young boy reveals the truest gift of Christmas, kindness. The students have created 12 Days of Kindness Santa's, which lists 12 acts of kindness they are going to work to accomplish in the days leading to Christmas. 

Math 

Adding and regrouping continues to be a skill everyone needs a bit a reinforcement in. Lot's of practice went on this week, as students worked to solve word problems, 3 digit and 4 digit problems. We had a check-in quiz on Wednesday, and results show that students are continuing to rush, missing instructions and not completing questions properly. 

Next week, we will begin subtraction with regrouping. 

Science 4

Students got to try their hand at Seesaw this week! 

We have a class Seesaw which is a really cool app, where students can take pictures, record themselves speaking and draw on their images! To check out what we did, enter your parent codes (which will be sent home Monday) and visit Seesaw. It is also a downloadable app!

Calling, Australia!

A Few Reminders: 

• Kids Paint Day is December 3rd 
• Early Dismissal Dec. 6th
• Grade 3 Christmas Elves Collections have begun! This year each class is competing for most items donated! Grade 3's will be delivering the goods to Devon Christmas Elves on Dec. 8th. 
• Permission forms will be online. 
• Christmas Concert time! Dec. 18th is the date for Grade 3/4
• Afternoon Showtime is 1:10pm 
• Evening Showtime is 6:30pm 
• Please let Ms. Potter know if you will be away. 
• Last Day of Classes before break is Dec 22nd! PJ & Movie Day!!

CALLING, AUSTRALIA!

We were so lucky this week to interview a friend overseas! 

To prepare for our interview, students had to work on developing relevant questions to ask our special guest. 

First, we determined our purpose - why were we calling this person? We want to get to know all about her. 

Next, we thought of some categories of questions we'd like to ask. If we want to get to know someone we'd like to know their likes, dislikes, where they live, etc. 

Students each got a sticky, and chose a category to create questions for. I was really impressed with how meaningful, appropriate and thoughtful their questions were!

 

Then, we got to make the call!! When we called at 2:00 pm on Monday, it was already 7:00 am on TUESDAY morning for Kacy! This was so cool, because it was like we were calling someone in the FUTURE!
Students sat in a host chair when it was time to ask their questions, and even sang the Canadian Anthem for Kacy!


We got to learn lots about Australia, including how it is their summer right now! Another interesting fact, Kacy is a nurse in Queensland, and her hospitals name is....ROBINA HOSPITAL! That really blew the kiddos away!





Language Arts
In small groups, students did some exploring with words to learn about a new grammar concept. Looking at a group of words, students tried sorting them without any guidance. I like to do this first, because its very interesting to see how students see a group of words and the connections they can make! Once that had shared some of their grouping ideas, I started to give them hints/guidance. They had to sort them into 3 groups, a hint being all the words are nouns. Many students caught onto this clue, that they were all either a person, place or thing.

Finally, I asked the students to create two groups for the words, by looking at the letters in the words. This is where some caught on and saw some words started with CAPITAL letters!

This is when I introduced Common & Proper Nouns.

Common Nouns name any person, place of thing. They do not start with a capital letter.
ex. teachers, park, book. 

Proper Nouns name a specific person, place or thing. They do begin with a capital letter.
ex. Ms. Potter, Lions Park, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone

Most students understood the concept, and we will continue to reinforce it, as well as, edit our own writing for it.

Reading
When we read, sometimes the author does not tell us everything directly. Often as reader's we have to learn to read between the lines to understand a characters emotions, determine a setting or what is happening. This skill is called Making Inferences: using what we know, and clues from the text, we can determine what the author is trying to tell us. 

To introduce this skill, we watched an Oscar Nominated short film, from 2007. 

Using clues from the video, and knowledge we already have, students first worked independently on these questions:

• What’s the man’s job? How do you know?
• Where does the story take place? (Students may not have the background knowledge to guess accurately, but they can guess the climate.)
• How does the orange octopus/pink octopus/man feel? How do you know? (You can ask this throughout the video.)
• What do you think happens after the end of the film?

Then as a group we shared our answers. It was interesting to see the slight differences between answers, based on everyone's separate background knowledge. 

Want to try at home? 

Check out some of these videos:

(Please preview before watching with your child) 

Crumbs

- Why do the mice look around? Where do you think the crumbs came from?

Simon's Cat

- How do you think the cat feels? Why?

A big part of inferring is to make sure you can find evidence in the video, or text to support your theory. Students reinforced this skill in pairs with task cards. Reading a short paragraph, students worked to answer question about setting, character emotions or what could be happening. 

Ex. 

Kim turned off the lights and everyone found a place to hide. Nicky hid under the table where everyone had out presents. He peeked out and saw the front door starting to open. 

What are Kim and Nicky doing? How do you know?

I think Kim and Nicky are at a surprise party, because they mention presents under a table and hiding as someone is coming in the door. 

What will happen next? Why do you think so?

I think someone will come in and everyone will shout "SURPRISE!" because the lights were off and someone was coming in the front door. 

To create inferences, students had some fun making riddles! Choosing an object, students wrote word clues to try and have classmates guess what it could be!

Students really enjoyed reading these out to the class and having
everyone trying to guess their object.





Math 
Regrouping last week led us to our new concept: Adding with Regrouping! Students worked on adding and regrouping with 2, 3 and even some 4 digit numbers! This is a concept that needs lots of reinforcement, as students will sometimes forget to "carry the one".

We have been practicing this skill through dice games, workbook time and practicing with base ten blocks.  

Science 4  
This week in science we have looked at the many types of waste, including: solid waste, liquid waste, organic waste, recyclable waste and toxic waste.

Then we began looking at pre-consumer waste and post-consumer waste. 

Pre-Consumer waste is what we don't see, it is the waste created before the product gets to use. Often this waste can be recycled and reused to make more products. 

Post Consumer Waste is the waste we do see, it is created after we use the product, including packaging and the product itself. Most of this waste can be recycled as well. 

This brought us onto a discussion on durable, non-durable and disposable goods. These are the different way that products are created. We will expand on these types of goods next week in some activities. 

Social 4 

Celebrations and traditions differ all over the world, and this week students looked at India's various celebrations. Choosing one of our own traditions/celebrations, students compared it to one from India and wrote about how each is celebrated. 

We all got to look at what the traditional clothing in India for boys and girls looks like, and even had some examples brought in by a student, as well as a staff member! 

Next, we will begin to talk about Services in Communities and how they differ around the world. On Seesaw, students worked on a introductory activity about what services are and created a brain web. Check out Seesaw to see your child's work!