Harris- Grade 3 Ramsay

This week we continued our conversation about the importance of having a growth mindset. We used the book  Not Yet by Lisa Cox and Lori Hockem  as a springboard that helped us appreciate the process of striving towards a goal and not being defeated by our mistakes. We discussed how the main character showed perseverance, kindness, assertiveness, and a positive mindset. As a class, we were challenged to create a cartoon that showed the process we have all individually gone through when striving to reach a goal. We also used this opportunity to look at how cartoonists can illustrate simple facial expressions to inform the reader about a character's feelings. The students shared many examples of challenges they have overcome, such as learning how to ride a bike, swim in the deep end, play the violin, and knit a scarf. Reminding ourselves that goals take time to achieve and setbacks are inevitable is crucial to embrace our learning and the journey it takes us on.    ...

 To help support our role this week in counting the number of items that Ramsay School collected for the Veteran’s food bank drive, we began reviewing how to sort and classify objects according to one or more attributes. We discussed that attributes could be more than just the attributes we learned about in our pattern unit (colour, shape, size, direction, etc.); they can also include attributes that identify people, animals or types of food. 

  We started our week honouring and acknowledging National Indigenous Veterans Day on Monday, Nov. the 8th. We discussed the importance of honouring indigenous veterans who have served in missions across Canada and worldwide in times of war, conflict and peace. Room 8 also worked hard to bring in much-appreciated food donations for our Veteran food drive. Next week we look forward to applying our categorization and data collection skills and tallying the amount of food our entire school provided for our drive. The work of Georgia O'Keeffe inspired our artwork as we created mixed media pastel and water-colour poppies. This incredible American modernist artist was known for her paintings of enlarged flowers. We applied our talents as we learned about using cool and warm colours to give our artwork a more balanced look.  As we continued developing our ability to learn and implement reading strategies to extract meaning from text, the students listened to the story "Why wear a pop...

 How quickly October has ended, and a new month is upon us. We started this week with the changing of our calendar and an in-depth look at how to read a calendar using ordinal numbers ( 1st, 2nd, 3rd, etc. ), knowing the order of the months, as well as reciting the days of the week and knowing the abbreviations for them, i.e. Sunday/Sun. The grade three's are also beginning to learn how to read a calendar by indicating what day of the week a particular date falls on, how many specific days of the week there are in each month and saying the date correctly. Throughout the school year, we will continue to develop and build on our calendar skills.  The grade three class has also continued to apply their knowledge of number patterns related to tables. They have learned to identify rows and columns in a table and describe a pattern in a table of numbers. They have also known to use and create a T-table for number patterns made by adding or subtracting.  The grade two's have bee...

 This week our learning tasks were connected to our celebrations around Halloween. Here are a few of our "I can" statements as they relate to our activities: -I can use what I know and words in the text to figure out what I am reading (making inferences) -I can use what I know and show word from the text to prove what the author means ( drawing conclusions)   -I can make predictions and follow a procedure to create a chemical reaction. - I can develop problem solving, logical thinking skills and visual spatial awareness using tangram puzzle pieces. - I can identify nouns and add them to form a complete sentence. -I can invent a device that launches a pumpkin(bell) into the air using the materials provided.   -I can follow multistep instructions to create a beaded spider.  Please be reminded in honour of Remembrance Day, we will be collecting items for the Veteran’s Food Bank. If you are able to contribute we will continue to collect donations until  Wednesday , ...

Week of Oct. 12th  This week we started one of several lessons which focus on writing a personal narrative. We discovered a personal narrative is simply a true story about you. This can be tricky for students, so supporting them to break this task down with several mini-lessons is extremely beneficial. Our first mini-lesson was designed to help them understand what a personal narrative is and how to brainstorm a topic that they feel is worth writing about. When we brainstorm we think about all of the different things we can write about and find the best possible topic to write about. When you brainstorm personal narrative topics you can think about memories you have about things that have happened to you, fun things you have done with your family or friends trips you have taken or special places you have visited, activities you have done at school or anything else that has happened to you in your life. We discussed that it is important to choose a topic that you care about and reme...

 This week we have been focusing on our writing; specifically, we are beginning to address the difference between complete and fragmented sentences. We introduced the concept of nouns and verbs and the importance of having a period, exclamation or question mark at the end of our sentence. We continue to review letter formation and apply our understanding that letters can be formed and are either present in the sky, grass or dirt (see attached photograph). Greater knowledge of upper and lowercase letters will be our goal to ensure our printing does not contain uppercase letters in the middle of a word and only present for now, when we write "I" a person's name and at the beginning of a sentence. As we become more proficient with these concepts, they will be added to the student's self-editing checklist to be cued to correct these errors independently.  This week, in math, we have been extending our knowledge of patterns to include  simple number patterns made by adding...