Monthly Archives: December 2022

The Christmas Tree Ship and a Mentor Sentence

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While we read a print copy of this story, you can listen to the story here:


The students enjoyed thinking about history as we read this book, based on a true story. The students worked to identify the problem and solution. They also worked on inferencing skills throughout the reading.

Then, we read the following mentor sentence and examined it for verbs, nouns, adjectives. We also pointed out the temporal words. Students also noticed commas.

“Every year Captain Santa would load up his little schooner, Rouse Simmons, with thousands of beautiful Christmas trees from our northern Michigan forests.”

Today students were invited to imitate the sentence on sticky notes. Here are some examples:

Solving Addition and Subtraction Problems

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This task was presented for the first time to our grade 3’s.  Students wrote their problems on white boards and then recorded solutions and answer sentences on small paper to place under the boards. Then, they had the opportunity to visit each other’s boards and solve the problems. They then self-checked the answers. There was a lot of dialogue going on reading, explaining, and debating!

Students came up with problems that required a variety of skills: adding, subtracting, dividing.

Our follow-up discussion revealed a need to practise understanding problems, asking ourselves, “What is is happening? What is the action?’ We also learned that we have to identify distracting information!

Shaving Cream Evergreen Trees

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This visual arts project started with a can of shaving cream and some food colouring!

First, students created a smooth triangle with shaving cream. Most enjoyed the sensory experience of moving the cream around. Then, they dripped some food colouring and used a wooden stick to pull the colour through the shaving cream, creating swirls and lines throughout the triangle.

Next, they pressed a sheet of paper on top, peeled it back, and used a thick ruler to scrape off the shaving cream. A beautiful evergreen tree was left on the paper!

The last step was to use pastels, chalk and oil, to create a background.  The finished projects are beautiful!

 

Santa Postage Stamps

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Students followed a guided drawing process to create these fabulous Santas!

The Sentences Are Growing!

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Everyday the students engage in word study activities. They always start by sorting their target words for the week, thinking about spelling patterns and applying their knowledge to read, write, and use the words. On Wednesdays students choose 5 of their words to use in sentences. At the beginning of the year the sentences were very simple. But now, after a couple of months writing sentences and examining Mentor Sentences the students’ writing is starting to BLOOM!

Here are 3 examples of this week’s sentence writing:

Describing and Building with 3D Objects

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Learning to identify figures and describe the properties of 3D figures has been the focus of our math unit on geometry. Students first examined the shapes and learned appropriate vocabulary to use when describing them.

Then, they worked collaboratively to build a neighbourhood using their choice of 3D figures. Pictures were taken and students worked independently to describe their creations using the geometric vocabulary.

 

My Just Right Tree

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We started this project off with a couple of read alouds, giving students the opportunity to think about story elements. After each reading we discussed the main characters and their feelings and how those connected to their actions. We identified the problem and solution while retelling important events from the beginning, middle and end of the story.


Then, students were challenged to create a list of adjectives and phrases to describe the perfect holiday tree in their minds. The list was then used to draft a descriptive paragraph. Students  then published their paragraphs on a shared Google Slide and added a drawing using Google Draw.