Falling into place...

As we begin week three in grade three things are falling into place.  I try and make use of every inch of the classroom and the students respond well to the movement we do from subject to subject. Our language and math block have us, at the carpet, at our desks, in front of the smartboard, in the library, and then back at the carpet again, sometimes in one lesson.  I can usually tell when I am losing their interest and I am lucky to the have the extra room in my classroom to have the students roaming about from centre to centre, activity to activity.  We start our word centres this week. A different approach to spelling, than the typical copy and memorising that most of us did when we went to school.  Students use magnifying glasses, play dough, telephones, salt bins, and magnetic letters to name a few, to practise their September words.
We will be reading and doing activity with the story Enemy Pie by Derek Munson.
This was introduced to me by Kaitlin and she has done some amazing things with it. I like using it at the beginning of the year to tackle some of the "Friends" issues before they really begin. Then I refer back to it as needed throughout the year. I'm excited to try making a pie with the class this week.  I have made cookies, cinnamon buns,  pretzels, cake, bread, soup, apple grilled cheese, pizzas, caramel  apples, candy apples, stew, but not pie. 

Last week in the classroom, we finished examining the different story elements in "First Day Jitters". We also spent some time dissected the nouns, verbs and adjectives. The students began a word library where we stored some incredible words to use in our daily writing. 

We started to fill our blessings jar in the classroom with the small things that we can take for granted on a daily basis. I told the students I expect to fill the jar this year, and then we started making some really great predictions as to how long it will take us.  (Great open ended question for math) ;)

 

 

 

The students worked on portraits that began with a simple letter "U" and miraculously turned into incredible pictures of themselves. Here are a few.

 

 

 

 

 

When taking a bite into adjectives and apples, we took a sneak peak into fractions. |We won't be learning about fractions for a while but it was a great connection for us, and I told the students that we will need to know these particular fractions for next week when we are baking.

 

 

Hope everyone had a great weekend.

 

I want to say a special "Hi" to the parents and students of my grade three class that might be stopping by our blog for a look at all the great things happening in grade three!

 

I'm looking forward to a wonderful year with your children.

 

Sincerely,

Christine