january News
weeks of jan. 22 - Feb. 2
Our new specials schedule is awesome!
Last week we began combining the 3A and 3B classes for Music and P.E. We love this new arrangement. There are more students to play sport games with. And we can sing and play instruments in a "round." Here's a little peek at our first combined Music class from Thursday, January 25.
Vietnamese Culture Studies:
Tet Nguyen Dan
Co Oanh led the class in a fascinating lesson on the history of Tet in Vietnam. Students watched the video below and made special decorative fans using Tet money envelopes. Thank you, Co Oanh for this fun lesson!!
Math
This week we've started our sixth math unit! We're leaving fractions behind (for now) and revisiting mathematical operations - subtraction, multiplication and division.
Here is an overview of what we're doing.
- Reviewing how to use the trade-first method to solve subtraction problems.
- Building fact fluency through games (Multiplication Baseball, Beat the Calculator, and Fact Family Races)
- Using square products to find the products of near squares.
To help your child at home...
- review multiplication and division facts - the goal is for students to be able to answer the problems quickly.
- review the unit vocabulary - use the slideshow below. New words will be added as we learn them, so look often at the slides for changes.
Unit 6 Family Letter.pdf
Reading Workshop:
Learning Through Reading: Countries Around the World
This week we are entering the world of non-fiction again. We've begun gathering information about other countries. We are reading as researchers do, looking for new information about a topic.
This unit isn't just about collecting unrelated facts about countries. This unit is all about collecting facts about the country from the standpoint of a travel researcher. The information students get from reading will be used to build a travel website for other children in Vietnam to visit before going on holiday.
This week we learned that...
...readers often read easier texts before moving to harder books/texts, looking for subtopics that cross boundaries.
Easy texts first means that we can:
- get an overview of a country
- learn new vocabulary
- understand some information that might be found in harder books
...readers as researchers look through different lenses: people, religion, food, environment. We can study one subtopic in different texts and take notes on a different page in our notebook for each topic.
social studies:
Children Around the World
We are now in the middle of a fascinating Social Studies unit. Here are some of the Focus questions we've been answering:
- Is it important to learn about children who are different from us? Why?
- We read the book "Each Kindness" to think about our reactions to children who are different from us. Ask your child why Chloe (the main character) was throwing rocks into the pond after Maya moves away?
- How am I different from someone from another culture?
- Students read small articles about children from all around the world. We compared how their lives are different from ours because of where they live.
- What does it mean to be in the shoes of someone from a different culture?
- Students listened to a story about a girl named Nujeen, a Kurd from Syria. Students imagined what life would be like if he or she was Nujeen and wrote a journal entry telling what they would think and feel. (see below)
- How is our life in Vietnam different from living in another country?
- How is the country of Vietnam different from another country?
Nujeen Mustafa is a refugee from Syria. She is 17 years old. She escaped the war in Syria by travelling 3,500 miles in a wheelchair to get to Germany. Read more at newsela (you can create a free account!)
Writing Workshop:
Once Upon a Time...
We are super excited about this next writing unit. As we begin reading and researching countries around the world, we are also beginning to jump into the world of fairy tales and folk tales from around the world.
This week we revisited three well-known fairy tales: "The Three Billy Goats Gruff," "Little Red Riding Hood," and "Cinderella." After recounting how the stories go, students chose one of these stories to adapt.
And here's what we learned as writers!
- Writers can change one or more of the story elements to adapt a story.
- Writers plan how an adaptation of a story will go, making sure that the change they make leads to other changes so the whole story fits together.
- When writers are writing, they can rehearse in the middle of the writing as well as at the start of it. This brings the characters and a setting to life.
Stay tuned!
Poems From the Heart: A Writing Celebration
This week we finished our writing unit on poetry. It was a fantastic unit to start 2018 with. Students wrote many heartfelt, funny, emotional, silly, and creative poems during this unit.
Poetry anthologies will be uploaded to Seesaw soon so that you can read the work of your child. Until then, take a look at these lovely photos of 3B students sharing their work with classmates.
Week of jan. 15-18
saying good-bye
tae hyun uhm
This week we had to say good-bye to one of our classmates. Living in Vietnam with our families is an adventure filled with incredible sights, smells, and foods. It also holds some sadness because we often have to say good-bye to people as they come and go.
Tae Hyun has been at Concordia since he was in Grade 1. Many of the students in G3 have been his friends for a number of years. And some of us have only known him since August. But we all love and treasure Tae Hyun!
This morning, we shared many of the reasons we enjoyed having Tae Hyun in our class. We also shared memories of what we will carry with us in our hearts after he leaves.
Tae Hyun we will miss you, but we wish you happiness where ever you go!
The dream flute ensemble
On Thursday, we had the pleasure of listening to musicians and singers from Seoul, S. Korea. This group performed a number of songs for us on a variety of instruments. The selection of songs were from all over the world, Austria, Korea, and Italy to name a few. And we were inspired to see children, teenagers, and adults all sharing their talent with us.
Here's a montage video of some of the musical highlights brought to us by the Dream Flute Ensemble.
science:
water and climate unit
We had an incredible amount of fun this week creating something to protect humans and animals from weather hazards.
What is a weather hazard? A weather hazard is an extreme weather event that threatens people or property.
What are examples of weather hazards? Examples of weather hazards include tornadoes, blizzards, tsunami, floods, and drought.
How did we have fun learning about weather hazards? Students had to choose one weather hazard to research. Their task was to create or draw something to protect against their weather hazard and present on it.
CLICK THROUGH THE SLIDESHOWS BELOW TO SEE THE AMAZING CREATIONS!
Reading Workshop:
We read poetry
In both Reading Workshop and in Writing Workshop we are discovering, playing with, and entering the world of poetry.
This week we learned that...
...parts of a poem work together. We read the poem "Valentine for Ernest Mann" by Naomi Shihab Nye (1952) to discover that three stanzas seemed to be about different things (ordering tacos, poems are hidden, and giving skunks as valentines) actually helped the reader understand that we can see beauty in life.
...poems have a theme. Themes could be about family, home, school, feelings, etc.
...readers of poetry can make a mental image when reading a poem. Reading "The Red Wheelbarrow" by William Carlos Williams (1963) illustrated that descriptive words give readers a mental picture and set the mood of a poem.
Writing Workshop:
we are poets, and we know it!
We're continuing to make our way through our poetry unit. Many funny, goofy, insightful, and even sad, poems are being written by 3B students.
This week we learned that...
...using adjectives can make our poems more descriptive.
One example we played around with in class was changing this phrase: my eyes lit up
Here are our descriptive ideas to make this phrase easier for the reader to imagine:
- my small, black eyes lit up with sadness, learning that Minecraft was dead.
- my shiny, brown eyes lit up with excitement
- my eyes lit up with a burning hatred for the bully who haunts my days
...writers think about what kind of mood they want their poem to have and choose words to create that mood. We read "Honey Do's" and "Shadows" in class (see the poems below).
...when we edit our writing, we have to make decisions about what conventions we will follow, keeping our readers in mind.
week of Jan. 8 - 12
(Reflecting on what was learned, and peeking at what's ahead in 2018.)
Math
This week we've started our fifth math unit! We're zipping right along!
Here is an overview of this week's learning of Fractions and Multiplication Strategies:
1. Students used foam fraction circles to represent fractions as equal parts of different wholes.
2. We found ways to represent fractions using standard notation and words and drawings.
3. Students had fun recognizing and displaying equivalent fractions.
4. We're whizzes at multiplication already, but we reviewed our multiplication helper facts to solve HARDER multiplication facts.
Next week, we will begin to learn:
- how to use doubling to solve multiplication facts and number stories.
- how to find patterns in math problems.
- How to play Salute! to find missing factors.
This vocabulary slideshow will be updated as new words are learned. Check back often.
And use this online resource -
Unit 5 Family Letter.pdfReading Workshop:
Here's what 3B readers learned in 2017:
I can build a Reading Life!
- I can choose books as if they were GOLD.
- I can choose just-right books and read TONS of them.
- I can set reading goals and track my progress.
- I can share books. Talking about them makes them come alive and our friend can help us discover new books.
- I can check for comprehension: What's the book about?
- I can use clues within the book: What am I imagining as I read?
- I can predict what will happen next.
- I can retell the story so it sticks!
I can Read to Learn!
- I know how fiction texts differ from non-fiction texts.
- I know how to find the main idea and supporting details within non-fiction.
- I know how to become an expert and teach others.
- I know how an author's opinion is different from facts.
- I know that some non-fiction is written in a narrative way.
- I know how to read biographies and find underlying meaning.
Here's what 3B readers are discovering now:
- How can I read lots of poems, paying attention to mood, sounds, word choice, and images?
- How can I notice how these elements and the parts of a poem work together to create meaning?
- How can I read novels with a new appreciation for the word choice, figurative language, and imagery an author uses?
Writing Workshop:
science:
water and climate unit
In 2017, we learned a lot about water!
Let's review...
Here are the BIG ideas we discovered:
- Water forms beads on waterproof materials and soaks into absorbent materials.
- Water moves downhill. Larger water domes move faster down a slope than smaller domes.
- Temperature is the measure of how hot matter is.
- Water expands when heated and contracts when cooled.
Then we learned a little about weather!
Let's review...
Here's what we've discovered so far:
- How to build a thermometer out of a jar.
- Weather is measured using observation and tools such as thermometers, wind vanes, and rain gauges.
Here's what 3B Scientists are exploring now:
- How to interpret the typical weather conditions in our region.
- Mapping out how the Sun's energy drives weather.
- Differentiating between climate and weather. Climate is the average weather in different regions on Earth.
- Describing climate using models of zones around the earth.
Are you interested in More experiments at home?
Click through the videos below to experiment with new weather and climate science ideas.