Presentations and Treasure Hunting

 We began the week with student presentations on the different ways that religions have influenced the world around us from art, buildings, and customs to what we eat and even how we say farewell at funerals.

We also discussed the importance of showing tolerance and acceptance for other people's beliefs and religions by looking at some examples of what intolerance for religion looks like through images of events such as 9/11.

The highlight of the week was the start of our fourth unit of the year under the transdisciplinary theme of Where We Are in Place and Time! A whole unit on maps!!

What better way to start a unit on maps than to go on a treasure hunt where X literally marks the spot! The students were split up into 6 groups, each with a map to one of 6 'treasures' to be found around the school. Before finding the treasure, the students had to find the other members in their group which was a bit of a challenge in itself as there were 3 different maps, and 2 different versions of each map with a different treasure for each group.

Once they found their partner(s) and before they could leave the class they had to take a few minutes to look closely at their maps to figure out where they thought their treasure was hidden. Was it on the first floor? second floor? or outside? This was not easy as two of maps were architectural floor plans of the school building and another was a hand-drawn map of empty playground space at the back of the MPR. 

When they could correctly identify where they thought their treasure was, they could leave the class to go hunt for the treasure. Most were hidden in plain sight, a couple of them were camouflaged nicely. (Unfortunately, one wasn't quite hidden enough and a student from another class unwittingly removed it so our treasure hunters couldn't find it, but we managed to track it down! The treasures were in brown envelopes (recycled from the PTA-made Advent calendar). Can you spot the hidden treasure in the fish tank photo below?

Once they found the treasures they returned to class and had to guess at what some of the difficult words meant before finding the definitions in the dictionary. Then as a class, we put the puzzle pieces of the Central Idea for the unit together, along with the definitions and ideas that the students had.

Next week, we'll find out what the students really know about maps!

Report Cards

Half of Grade 3 is over already and reports will be in your email inbox at 3:30. Please read them over together with your child, after all, it is all about them! 

Conferences

We will also have our conferences next week, so the students have been busy reflecting on the first half of the year and we will discuss their progress so far.

Wrapping Up and Moving On

This week was a week of continuing work on a couple of topics as we start to wrap some of them up.

In our Religion Unit, our focus for the week has been working on a research project that shows or compares how religions have influenced and shaped different aspects of our life, from art and architecture to weddings, and even funerals. Student agency takes place when the students are given "voice and choice" over what they would like to do and learn about, so they were able to choose a topic of their own interest for this project. For next Monday, they need to be prepared to present about their chosen topic, using a slideshow that they have created themself. The goal of the project is to show or compare how religion has influenced their chosen topic and need to include at least 3 examples from different religions. 

In math, we continued to work on multiplication skills. This week or focus was on using multiplication to solve real-world problems and the students were the ones who created their own word problems for the class and have been working on solving them on a Seesaw assignment.

And in PE we continued working on our soccer skills!

In the coming weeks, we will be moving on to a new unit of inquiry next week under the Transdisciplinary Theme, Where We Are in Place and Time. In math, we will soon be moving on to measurement, and in language we will be starting narrative writing and Book Clubs/ Reading Groups in a few weeks. So there are a lot of things to look forward to this new year!

Happy New Year 2022!

 Welcome back, everyone! I heard that everyone had a nice winter holiday and is ready to be back in school! We had another short, but busy week as we got back into our daily routines and continued on our learning journeys! With this week having been assessment week, the students had to have several tests on their reading, writing, and math skills! 

In our unit of inquiry, we continued finding out more about world religions and focused on the history of two important religious figures, Siddhartha Gautama (better known as the Buddha) and Jesus Christ. We also reviewed the students' understandings of what religion is and why people believe in religion. (Yes, those were a couple of deep questions, but the students did well at sharing their understanding of them.)

When learning about Jesus, we tried a new note-taking method called sketching, which uses simple drawings, labels, titles, and notes to keep track of information. 

In math we learned how to use brackets and discovered that there are several ways to multiply numbers to come up with same outcome.

Since it was raining on Tuesday, we moved our PE lesson to Wednesday and began our soccer unit on the Green Field. It was a lot of fun!