February 22nd-26th I hope that everyone is healthy and doing well. We have been fortunate to have fantastic winter weather. The children are really enjoying their outdoor recess time with their friends. I have been inactive on my website since the Christmas break. This term I am focusing on preparing a weekly Hapara workspace for students. Please feel free to reach out through an email or a phone call with any questions or concerns you may have throughout the remainder of the school year. I will also continue to tweet out photos of special classroom activities. Take care, Janet Hamelin
December 14th-18th It is hard to believe that it is almost the Christmas break. We have been working very hard in Grade 3. We had a virtual coding lesson with Mrs. Aubrey last week. The children learned a great deal and are having fun coding in scratch. We will continue on this learning journey throughout the school year. Leah the Engineer will be joining our Grade 3 classes this Wednesday for a Christmas STEM activity. Be sure to ask your child all about this lesson. In Math we made 3-D skeletons out of marshmellows and spaghetti noodles. We also made 3-D solids out of nets. The chidren were able to use these solids to count the number of vertices, edges and faces on each shape. We have moved onto linear measurement and we will continue working on this math strand into the new year. In Language Arts we are engaged in writing point of view stories of "The First Christmas". We will be working hard on these stories all week long. We will be having our word wall quiz on Wednesday morning. Remind your child to practice creating compound sentences with their words. The word wall words are: everything, everybody, someone, something, inside. Thank you to all the families that donated shampoo, conditioner, brushes and combs for our Grade 3 Advent project. We will be decorating shoeboxes and creating special care packages for people that will be accessing the Heron Emergency Food Centre this Christmas. Have a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year! Enjoy this speical season and stay healthy.
November 16th-20th I really enjoyed connecting with parents during our phone interviews last week. If you have any questions or concerns throughout the year please feel free to contact me by email or jot a note in the agenda. I will get back to you as soon as I can. We have been working really hard in Grade Three. Our theme last week was on Remembrance Day. We wrote letters to veterans, read and wrote beautiful poems about peace and created lovely poppies in Art. We also had a unique opportunity to take part in a live on-line Remembrance Day presentation with a Canadian veteran. In Math we continued to practice our skills in adding and subtracting two and three digit numbers with regrouping. We also played a few fun Kahoot games in which we practiced our doubles and other mental math computations. We will continue with adding and subtracting and begin working on 2D Geometry. There will be homework assigned in Hapara workspace this week. It will be posted in the agenda. Our theme this week is Bully Awareness week. Lessons in Language Arts and Religion will be on this important theme. Take good care and have a great week!
November 2nd-6th We had a spooktacular spirit week! St. Gemma has such great school spirit. The children had a lot of fun creating their own monsters and completing descriptive monster paragraphs. Many students and teachers have stopped in the hallway to read and admire their creative work. We will have our word wall quiz this Thursday. We continued to work on estimating and rounding in Math. Our focus for the next two weeks in Math will be on adding and subtracting two and three digit numbers with and without regrouping. We had a successful planning session with engineer Leah last week. The children are very excited to build their structures this Wednesday. Hapara workspace is shared with your child each week. Please access the assignements if your child is away from school for a period of time. Please don't have your child work on Hapara if they are attending school daily unless it is assigned for homework. Your child is invited to bring indoor shoes to school now. I will provide a shoe bin for each student. If possible please send your child with white board markers for their personal use. They could also use a sock for a whiteboard eraser. Enjoy the first week of November! October 26th-30th We worked hard last week on visualizing, descriptive paragraph writing and completing our byweekly word wall quiz. In Math we looked at three digit numbers and decided if they were greater than, less than or equal to each other. We also focused on estimating. This week we will be learning about rounding numbers to the nearest 10 and addition. The children have been researching a saint of their choice and they will have an opportunity to present their saint to the class. The Grade 3 classes at St. Gemma have started a great partnership with a program called Engineers In Residence. Leah, a local Electrical Engineer will lead us in exciting STEM projects throughout the year. We had our first Google Meet last week and we are excited to meet up with her again on Wednesday. *Please make sure your child brings home a leveled reader and worksheet each week. This is an important year to get reading fluency and comprehension down pat before moving into the junior grades. We have a spooktackular week planned! Monday: PJ Day and new word wall words Tuesday: Colour day Our class colour is Green! Wednesday: Jersey Day and Google meeting with Engineer Leah! Thursday: Mix Up Clothes Day Friday: Wear Orange and Black!! If your child is away from school please check out Hapara for class work. * If you can provide white board markers for your child it would be appreciated. We are making good use of the individual white boards, but are running short on markers. Enjoy your week.
October 19th-23rd We had a great learning week. We started using computers in the classroom. Each child should be familar wtih getting onto Hapara Workspace. We will do a few in class activities on Hapara Workspace again this week. if your child is away from school for a period of time they can easily access the work at home. The workspace is updated each week. If your child has a chromebook they can bring it to school. Please make sure that your child has used their ocsb student account on the chromebook before they bring it to school. A set of headphones would also be very useful to have at school. They can either be kept in your child's backpack or personal bin. I have purchased individual white boards and markers for each student, so the children can remain safely in their seats and show their work without going up to the board. Your child will require a few extra whiteboard markers for their personal board. The next word wall quiz will be on Thursday October 22nd. The words are: next, then, last, finally. We have been using these words when we work on procedural writing. In language Arts we are focusing on visualizing and descriptive writing. The children will have an opportunity to create a haunted house and write a descriptive paragraph of their house. I'm sure they will be spooktacular!!
in Math, the children will be working on adding and subtracting skills and work on solving a variety of problems through math talks. Your child is bringing home a just right reading level book with a reading response activity. I would like this to be completed and returned each week. Have a great week and stay healthy! October 13th-16th Happy Thanksgiving! I hope that everyone enjoyed the beautiful fall weather with your family. I am looking forward to hearing all about everyone's Thanksgiving weekend in the journals this week. We started last week off with our school wide Terry Fox Run. Everyone was keen and full of energy throughout this special event. It was a great success! Thank you to all the families that supported the Terry Fox run this year. Take some time to visit the school Terry Fox Padlet to see some fun photos of St. Gemma's school spirit. We completed our patterning unit in Math and have moved on to representing numbers in different ways. In English Language class, students wrote a procedural text on how to make their favourite sandwich. They really got creative with the different sandwich types. We also continued reading our class read aloud "A boy Called Bat" and worked on some interesting reading response questions. We took some time last week to reflect on what we are thankful for and each student created a giving thanks pumpkin. I hope that you enjoyed the festive pumpkins and enjoyed reading the many things your child is thankful for. The word wall quiz book will be going home on Tuesday to get signed and make corrections. I have been very impressed with the quality sentences the children are creating for their word quizes. The new word wall words are: next, then, last, finally. The next quiz will be on Thursday October 22nd. Your child will start bringing home a just right reading level book with a reading response activity. I would like this to be completed and returned each week. We are starting to use computers in the classroom this week. If your child has a chromebook they can bring to school please send it on Wednesday. Please make sure that your child has used their ocsb student account on the chromebook before they bring it to school. I would like each child to get familiar with using Hapara Workspace. Homework will be assigned periodically on Hapara Workspace, so the children get familar with how to navigate the site. Enjoy your week. October 5th-9th We had a very busy week in Grade 3. We spent a few blocks learning about residential schools and the negative impact they had on Indigenous People in Canada. We read stories, had meaningful discussions, created a message on a t-shirt and wrote to Prime Minister Trudeau about the "Every Child Matters" movement. In Math we continued working on growing and shrinking patterns and participated in some great Math talks. We will be wrapping up patterning this week and moving on to Number Sense. In Language Arts students have been practising how to write a procedure. So far students completed a writng task on how to get ready for school each day and how to describe an activity of their choice. This week students will have the opportunity to write procedural steps on how to make their favourite sandwich. We will also find opportunities to write in our journals and complete a Thanksgiving prayer. Word wall words: first, into, of, off, very Next word wall quiz: Friday October 9th. We had a great deal of fun taking part in the Terry Fox "What's Your 40" activity. Our class chose to participate by doing 40 ski jumps twice a day for a week. Mr. Cinanni even joined in on the fun one day. We are looking forward to participating in the Terry Fox run on Monday. Hopefully the rain will hold off for us! Have a wonderful week and enjoy your Thanksgiving weekend.
September 28th-October 2nd Week three in Grade 3 went very well. All students had an opportunity to present their "Me Bag". It was a nice way to get to know a little bit more about each other. We took advantage of the nice weather and participated in some outdoor learning. We read, made some tree observations, found signs of fall and played a few cooperative games. In Math we worked on growing and shrinking patterns. We created patterns with multiple attributes changing. We also worked on some challenging math talks and had some great discussions. In Language Arts we started our class read aloud "A Boy Called Bat" and made some predictions about the novel. To get us excited about our event on Friday and more informed about Terry Fox, we read the book "Terry and Me" and watched a moving video about Terry's Marathon of Hope. We will continue to work on activities this week related to Terry Fox. In Science we started started our unit on Structures. We brainstormed structures from nature and structures that are human made. Raz Kids and Prodigy logins went home last week. There will be homework assigned on Raz Kids and Prodigy this week. The word wall quiz book will go home this week. Please sign and return the book promptly. Week At A Glance Monday: word wall quiz book goes home to get signed New word wall words assigned: Tuesday: Raz Kids and Prodigy homework assigned Wednesday: Orange Shirt Day Thursday: return word wall quiz book signed and with corrections Friday: Terry Fox walk/Run Wear your wacky socks Please consider supporting the Terry Fox Foundation. You can make a donation on our school website. Enjoy this beautiful fall weather!
September 21st-25th We had a successful second week back to school. Students are getting comfortable with the new school and classroom rules and expectations. Some students had an opportunity to present their special items in their 'Me Bag' and we will continue with the presentations this week. We took advantage of the nice weather and participated in some outdoor learning last week. We used our senses and wrote about what we saw, heard and felt in our outside surroundings. We started our Math unit on Patterning and also worked on some engaging math talks. Our school enjoyed celebrating International Dot Day last Tuesday. We read the book The Dot and completed a number of fun activities. Raz Kids and Prodigy logins will go home this week. If you or your child think the activities are too challenging or too easy, please let me know and I can change their level. I also encourage students to check out Typing Club in the Student Portal to practise their typing. * Word Wall quiz will be on Friday September 25th (again, are, because, have, were) Have a fantastic week and enjoy the sunshine! September 14th-18th We had a great first week of school in Grade Three. Last week we thoroughly went over health and safety expectations, student wellness and routines. We also completed a few fun getting to know me activites, read some stories and we did a few Math talks. It was an eventful week. please feel free to email me with any questions or concerns you may have. Have a great week and enjoy the sunshine! Week at a Glance: Monday: Week 2 begins! New Word Wall words (again, are, because, have, were, ) quiz Sept. 25th Tuesday: Dot Day! (wear polkadots and make your mark) Wednesday: ME Bag presentations (3 per day) Thursday: Me Bag presentations (3 per day) Friday: Me Bag presentation (3 per day)