Working on writing

This week we are working on our writing skills. We are looking at what makes a good sentence. In term two we are going to work on writing more interesting complete sentences.

Here are some fun online games to help the students recognize the differences between verbs, nouns and adjectives. These games also give the students some good ideas of words to use when they are writing. We will be playing these games in class this week, but I encourage you to play them at home with your children.

Have fun!

http://www.abcya.com/nouns_and_verbs.htm

http://www.missmaggie.org/scholastic/cleanup_eng_launcher.html

http://www.sheppardsoftware.com/grammar/adjectives.htm

http://www.oswego.org/ocsd-web/match/term/matchgeneric2.asp?filename=msmith5adverbshow

Estimation

We have been busy learning about numbers to 1000 in math! We also spent some time working on our estimation skills. We used the smart board to help us practice our estimation skills. The kids all looked at two jars of marbles. One jar had the amount of marbles and the students had to estimate how many were in the second jar. The students quickly caught on that by looking at the first jar they could easily tell if their estimate should be larger or smaller than the jar with the given number.

 

 

 

The kids had lots of fun seeing if their estimate was close to the real answer:

 

On Friday the students estimated how many fruit loops it would take to fill their hands:

Of course after our estimating we got to enjoy a few fruit loops for a yummy snack!

Remembrance Day Art

Sorry I haven't posted in awhile! I have been busy getting ready for report cards. They will go home Friday, November 21, 2014

Last week we got ready for Remembrance Day by making art that was displayed at the Remembrance Day service. Students painted a background in water colors.

While we let it dry we read a book about Remembrance Day and talked about what we were remembering and who we were honoring. Then they used pastels and created a poppy field. The pictures all turned out great and the best part was that everyone's picture looked different but still resembled a poppy field.

Ice-cream fun!

This week in art we learned some new things. We learned about tints, shades, and values.

A tint is when you mix a color with white (it gets lighter).
A shade is when you mix a color with black (it gets darker).
And value is when you show the color scale going from light to dark.

To demonstrate our new knowledge we did some yummy ice-cream art.
We started by choosing a color and painting one scoop that color.

 

 

 

Then we mixed in a little and a lot of white to two more scoops.
Some of the students were shocked that their red ice-cream was turning pink!

Then we added black to our ice-cream scoops and look what happened:

On day two we cut out our ice-cream and made cones. We also added sprinkles (felt) and of course we had to add a cherry on top!

It was a wonderfully delicious week in 3B!

P.S. Sorry that some of the pictures are upside down, I couldn't quite figure out how to flip them. :)

All About Kamsack

These next few weeks we will be learning about communities all over Kamack, Saskatchewan, Canada and the world. We will look at different cultures and traditions of these communities.
 To start off the unit we began with the community of Kamsack. The students brainstormed a list of things they loved about Kamsack.

During our community unit one of the cities we will be learning about is Saskatoon. To help us learn more about Saskatoon we are going to exchange letters with grade three class in Saskatoon. We wanted to teach the grade three's a little about Kamsack so we made them a class book. Each child made one page. At the top of the page they wrote out a "Kamsack Fact". Then they had to write one thing they love about Kamsack. Hopefully this will teach the grade three's in Saskatoon a little about our community.

 

 

The Power to Connect

This month in 3B we are working hard on connecting what we are reading to our lives. This will help us to become better readers because when your brain is connecting to what you are reading it will be easier to understand, and retell what you are reading.

 I have been modeling making connections all week with the students. I choose a book that I connect to and show the students what my brain is doing while I read. This includes me making connections to the text, pictures, characters, feelings and emotions. The students then respond with their own connections. Since we are all so different in 3B and make are own connections the students choose books from book bins of books I have collected from the library.

To visualize how many connections we are making the students write down each time they make a connection and I add it to our "connection train."

This week we are going to start sharing are connections which will allow us to make text-to-text connections.

Creating Yearbooks

This week we said goodbye to September and welcomed October. To say goodbye to September the students began making a grade 3 yearbook. Each month they will do a one page write-up summarizing our month together. Then they will create a picture page using pictures I took throughout the month and various art supplies. At the end of the year I will put their yearbook pages together and they will have their own yearbook to take home. To inspire the kids I brought one of my old yearbooks in and had the students guess which picture was Ms. Baranowski! Showing them my yearbook got them excited about creating their own.

We began working on the writing process by brainstorming in partners and then as a class before the students began their writing.

Here are some pictures of the writing process. (You will have to wait till June to see the finished product!):