G3A Class News

November 13-24

Toymaker Exhibition Update

The video and photos from our exhibition can be seen here on our Home Page. Enjoy!

Thanksgiving Lunch

"This is the best lunch ever!" one of the students at my table shouted. Thanksgiving is a special time to come together and express our gratitude for all the many blessings we have been given. I want to say that I am thankful for YOU, our special families. I am thankful for each of my students that I have the privilege to teach everyday. They make me laugh and make me proud. Thanks to all of you who prepared delicious food and joined us for our Thanksgiving lunch. Here are a few photos of our time together.

Opportunities for Giving

At Concordia we value generosity and giving to those who are in need. This month we have several different opportunities to give back to our community. As a school we are raising money for SympaMeals, a local organization that provides meals for families in need of cancer treatment. Here are a few ways you can give if you desire:

  • Movember Mustache Growing Competition. Students can donate to support their favorite mustache growing teacher and can bring money to a Bake Sale on November 29.
  • Walk-a-Thon Nov. 27-Students can find sponsors who will donate money for each lap they walk or run.
  • Market Day Dec. 7-Students can bring 50,000 vnd buy items created by the Grade 4 students.

Reading

We have been learning how to grow ideas about the characters in our books. First we pay attention to the actions, words, and thoughts of the character and then we try to form a theory about that character. Students are using post-its to mark significant parts of the story and trying to write what they think about that part. Here is an example from one student's notebook:

Writing

This week we have been writing literary essays. These are structured writing pieces about our opinions of the characters in our books. Students are learning that this type of writing follows a specific structure in which they express their opinion and support it with evidence from their text. They will write 3-4 different drafts and then choose their favorite one to publish.

Math

This week students completed the Unit 3 Assessment. They revised their work and reflected on how their thinking changed throughout the unit. You can see your child's reflection in their Seesaw portfolio. We now turn our attention to data, measurement and geometry in this next unit. Here is the Unit 4 Family Letter.

Unit 4 Family Letter.pdf

Science:

For the next few weeks we will be learning all about water, weather and climate. This week we focused on learning about some of the properties of water and investigating what happens when a drop of water falls on certain materials.

November 6-10

Genius Hour: Toymaker's Challenge

Our toymaker's challenge is finally completed and we are ready to share our toys with you.

We hope you can join us on November 14 at Play! Cafe.

The students will share their products and explain more about the design thinking process.

See you there!

A New Class Pet

We have inherited a new class pet: a hamster! My friend who is moving to Canada was looking for a new home for her sons' hamster, Minecraft. After discussing it, Ms. Gunay and I decided that we would share responsibilities for caring for the hamster. I am not allowing the students to touch or handle the hamster, but we are beginning to learn what we need to do to take care of Minecraft. Apparently, some students are already experts.

Reading

This week we completed our nonfiction reading unit. On Friday, to celebrate, we took time to read each other's books. I also taught the students how to make meaningful and helpful comments to their classmates. You can see some of their comments below.

Writing

This week we also celebrated all that we have learned about writing nonfiction text. The students published beautiful nonfiction books that they shared with our 11-12 Grade Concordia friends. They were so nervous to go to the "High School" and share their books but in the end they were all glad they did. They also received some great feedback for improving their writing next time. Here are some photos from that day.

Math

We are continuing to learn about the properties of subtraction, addition and multiplication and learn different strategies. In addition, this week we learned about scaled bar graphs and created a few of our own. Next week is our last week for Unit 3 and the following week we will take the Unit 3 math assessment.

Social Studies

The students have been busy completing their social studies projects. They have three different projects that they are working on:

  • They are creating their own digital map and will be recording themselves explaining their map.
  • They are working on a slide show to explain the difference between wants and needs
  • They are writing a mini-book about a place they have chosen.


October 30-November 3

Parent-Teacher Conferences

Thank you to everyone who came to meet with me. Honestly, this is one of my most favorite times of the year. It is always good to sit down face to face and share how we can work together to help your child be the best learner he/she can be. I learned many helpful things that I hope to implement as the days go by. I look forward to our continued partnership and celebrating your child's successes.

Having fun in art class with Ms. Carter working on 3-D shapes.

Math

This week we talked about how math is very flexible. There are many strategies and ways to solve problems. Most students come into third grade knowing one way to add and subtract 2 and 3 digit numbers. However, this week we learned some new and different strategies such as : partial sums addition, column addition, and counting up subtraction. (See the Unit 3 Family Letter for examples)

Friday Math Challenges

Often on Fridays we do a math challenge. Today we tried to solve this problem from Youcubed.org. Can you solve it? How many cubes will figure 10 have? How about figure 55?

The students worked for a while to look for different patterns to predict how many cubes it will take as the stairs increase. Ms. Lee and I also worked on looking for formulas that could work. It's fun to work on big challenging problems together.

Ms. Lee and I trying out our own solutions and number models.

Reading

When we read biographies we can read with different lenses. We can:

  • Read it as a story of a famous person (what are the character traits? What are the challenges? What life lessons are learned?) or
  • Read it to learn information about that event or time period

Ask your child who they have been reading and what they are learning?

Writing

We are in the final stretch of our information books. The students have been working hard on publishing their books, including all they have learned about information writing and text features. These books will be completed next week and we plan to read them to some older Concordia students to get their feedback.

Social Studies

Our focus questions for the week have been:

  • What is the difference between wants and needs?
  • How do our wants and needs affect others and the environment?

We read a book called Seeds of Change about a Kenyan woman named Wangari Maathai who was the first African woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize. It highlights what can happen we we compete for natural resources.

This next week, the students will be working on creating a digital map and they will give a tour of their map to demonstrate their understanding of all that we have learned in this unit.