Another "short" week

Ok, so it may not feel like it (to me), but it is another short week. In case you forgot, there is no school for students (all of the students in Manitoba actually) on Friday. Teachers are busy involved in professional learning sessions throughout the day. Time for us to be the students!

With a short week, TIA and hockey, we will not have Word Study again. I hate to miss it two weeks in a row because establishing our routine is so important, but I would rather we do it right or not at all. We will be back at it next week, so look for words to come home on Wednesday. I hope your child is saying and sorting his/her words Wednesday and Thursday nights as practice for their test on Friday. Other fun ways to practice spelling words: type them into a word document, write them with bubble letters, write them in rainbow colours or write them as triangles (see example below).

s

sh

sho

show

showe

shower

Grade 3 families, I sent home information about swimming today. Please read ALL of the information carefully. We are taking part in the Winter I session, which begins in November and finishes the last week before the winter holiday. Please complete and return the slip about previous swimming lessons your child has taken, as well as the permission form to participate (both are colour-coded green for your ease). I already have medical forms completed from our community walk. I will be speaking with students about what swimming will look like for us closer to the start date. At that time, I will also send home a tips & tricks hand-out and a swimming bag checklist for families. Students and I are equally excited for swimming to begin. With swimming, hockey AND winter concert practice, "dull" will not be a word we can use to describe December! :)

PJ day tomorrow! Remember to bring a donation for UNICEF to participate. Leave stuffies at home, thanks!

~Ms. Burland

Terrific TIA

On Monday, we had our final TIA session with artist- extraordinaire, Lynne! It was a creative way to start the day. Students lost themselves in the task of completing their community tile, adding details such as grass, fields, street lights, fence and even basketball nets (very novel idea, Noah M.!). I was very proud of how polite and patience students were when using Lynne's supplies. Manners were used to borrow other table's materials and students were careful not to waste.

We are writing about our TIA experience and are using the iPad app Book Creator to help us! It is a user-friendly app (even I can do it!). Students are even able to speak their writing into the app to add text to pages, speeding up the timely task on typing... a huge benefit when we one have one iPad in the classroom. Once published in iBooks, our new book with look professionally published, equipped with turning pages and all! 

Here are students' finished products: (remember, it was wacky hair day...)

*A few students did not follow instructions and thus, I do not have picture of them with their project at the time :(

Students are eager to take their projects home, but we discussed our desire to have our families see the ENTIRE community model. We will leave our projects at school for Student-Led conferences in November. Here is a sneak-peek of what it looks like:

A special thanks to Lynne for, yet again, her wealth of knowledge, ideas and support!

~Ms. Burland

Jammed Packed Week!

Dear Team 24 Families,

I hope everyone enjoyed the Thanksgiving Day long weekend! It may be a short week, but this week is full of many exciting activities and events! For this reason, we will not have Word Study this week.

On Tuesday and Wednesday, we had our first two TIA sessions with our artist/architect Lynne. She is fabulous with the students and is extremely creative! We are lucky to be working with her. With her leadership, we are designing a large model of a community. Each student has a tile within the community on which to build building, roads, parks, and so forth. Each tile fits to together to form one large community. Here is what it looks like so far:

Hockey also started today! Students were buzzing with excitement, especially the grade 2 students who are new to the program. Students will take the ice for the first time this school-year today.

Tomorrow we have a Bullying Presentation scheduled with the Constable assigned to our school division. It will surely be an informative presentation. 

We will also head out on our community walk tomorrow afternoon (our rain date). PLEASE PLEASE ensure your child has handed in their permission and medical form. We had 8 students without these forms last Friday and therefore, could not go on our walk. We now still have 2 students without the necessary forms to attend. I will make another note in these two children's agenda books. Thank you to those families who had the forms in on time! It makes events like this much less stressful.

Within our writing project (our community book), we have assigned each letter of the alphabet/feature of our community to a student. For example, Liz has chosen the letter A for Assiniboine and Ilaina has chosen B for buildings. We will take pictures on our walk for our book.

On Friday, students have both gym and music, as well as bus ridership. We will board the bus in the parking lot and Bus Driver Bob will review safety rules for traveling on or being near a school bus. This will be especially important as students travel to and from hockey and swimming lessons on school buses. 

Whew! I am exhausted just thinking about the busy week we have ahead! Sure, every week is busy, but this one is packed just a little more :)

*Library is Monday*

~Ms. Burland

Learning on the Learning Carpet

Dear families, 

The Learning Carpet is a ten by ten grid carpet. Students quickly noticed that carpet looks like the 100 chart hanging on our math wall and on their name plates. 

We have been using the Learning Carpet to look at number patterns to 100 (grade 2s) and to 1000 (grade 3s). For the past two weeks, students have participated in various activities with the carpet. Students have being challenged with placing random numbers on the unfilled carpet and rationalizing the placement. Within their rationale, students described their number in relation to others using words like: before, after, 10 more and 10 less. We then looked at the placement of numbers on the learning carpet and noticed that rows of numbers have the same numbers of tens and the ones digit increases by 1 as you move to the right, decreases as you move left. Numbers in columns have the same numbers of ones and the number in the tens spot increases by one as you move down, decreases as you move up. We used base ten blocks to build rows and columns to concretely see the patterns.  Furthermore, students enjoy racing to set up the carpet. In table groups, students had to work together to set up as much of the chart to 50, 70 or 100 as they can before their 30 seconds run up. When it does, another table is up! We quickly rotate through tables, continuing until the chart is complete. Once completed, one student is chosen to leave the room while another switches a few of the numbers on the chart. The student re-enters the room and must spot and correct the switched numbers. Tons of fun!

Strong understanding of place value with provide a foundation for skip counting, addition and subtraction and problem solving. 

~Ms.Burland

Gobble Gobble

CHEESE! Today was picture day and for some reason, I'm not going to question it because it was great, our class had our pictures taken first! Everyone looked great and I can't wait to see the proofs.

Today, we did a Thanksgiving art project and made turkeys (or penguins as one student mistakenly called my sample turkey, complimenting it as a nice penguin! Tee hee!) The process got a little hectic and I didn't get a chance to take pictures during, but here are the finished products! 

Please remember that Friday is Fun Lunch and our community walk. I MUST have field trip and medical forms in by then for your child to participate. I have not had many handed in yet. I don't want anyone to miss out on the fun! Hopefully the weather cooperates.  

~Ms. Burland

Details of Another Busy Day of Learning

Whew! What a busy day full of learning activities! We started the day with a goal: to start our math journals before announcements. This meant having belongings in bins, placing RAH bags in mailboxes, opening our agendas on desks and getting shoes on within the first ten minutes of the day (a more than realistic goal when students focus on their job). Happily, almost everyone was successful and ready to start their math journals on time! Getting organized at the start of the day is an important part of setting ourselves up for a successful day. Prompt arrival at school each more is also very beneficial. 

School - wide guided reading/daily 4 took place at 9am. Ariella and Liz enjoyed reading on my iPad! Our class set of iPads are scheduled to arrive next week. I am excited to begin incorporating them into our daily routines and so are the students!

After music and recess, we practiced tying our shoes! This is a task that often takes up a lot of our time throughout the day.  For some students this was review and practice and for others it was a brand new concept. We reviewed 2 methods for tying shoes and students preferred the 2 loops method. Shoes were off and everyone learned and practiced both methods. Students eagerly helped others, modelled to neighbours on the carpet, raced against friends to tie the fastest and proudly showed off this important life skill. I have left shoes at school for students to practice with. Hopefully, with continued practiced, we will spend less time struggling with shoe laces and more time engaged in learning activities. 

Next, we played a place value game in which two cards are selected in turn to great the biggest number possible. Once a card was placed in the ones or tens column, it could not be removed. Once both cards were placed, a chance to recycle one card often was a game changer. Students played against myself and competition was heated :) I believe I won, although the may remember it differently! Numbers were recorded with the greater than and less than signs.  Students will play with a friend tomorrow. 

After lunch, we used google maps to look at a map of the world and countries of our origins. Students were very excited to see the countries they learned about from their family on the map. We then read a community alphabet book and edited the alphabet list we previously brainstormed. Tomorrow we will assign letters to students and begin pre-writing for our community book.  We will take pictures to accompany our writing during our community walk on Friday. 

Before recess we reviewed colours in French.  Students will need to understand colours in French throughout our studies this year.

During our Word Study period, we glued in our tests from Friday and began working with our new words for the week (this included a lesson on the carpet with myself). 

Guided reading groups/ independent reading was a calming way to end the day AND of course after packing up, we danced to Just dance Kids: Feeling Good.  

Whew! I'm tired just thinking about everything we did :) Great job Team 24 for a very productive Monday!!

Remember to return field trip forms!

Picture day Wednesday- bring in your forms!

~Ms. Burland

Leaf Splatter Paint

Last week, we got messy and had some fun during a fall themed art project. We taped the edges of our paper to create a crisp white border on our pieces. Next, students taped a construction paper leaf into the middle of the paper and began splattering fall coloured paint on their paper. When their page was thoroughly covered/ we ran out of time (some students could have splattered forever!), I removed the leaf to reveal the leaf shape in white, creating negative space- an image created with missing space. Ironically, some students weren't messy enough hand their leaf shape did not stand out against the white paper.  But fun and a (controlled) mess was created nevertheless!

A few finished pieces:

~Ms. Burland 

Monday Memories

What a way to start the week! This Monday we enjoyed a delicious pancake breakfast and had our Terry Fox run (which was rained out on Thursday)! 

 YUM! A great breakfast to start the day :)

 TEAM 24

 After recess, we ran for Terry Fox!

Out of breath! Our own track and field star! 

 Besties

Noah in action!

Action shots

~Ms. Burland